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Letters from Israel By Richard Levitas In July 2000, my wife Joyce and I, along with our 4 children, now aged 8 to15, moved to Israel. We both had lived in Baltimore all of our lives. Joyce graduated from Randallstown High School (‘83) and then UMBC (‘87). I graduated from Pikesville High School (‘78) and then University of Maryland - College Park in (’83). Prior to moving to Israel we worked together in an Information Technology company called PBCS that I started in 1984. After we were married in 1986, we both grew more observant through our affiliations with Baltimore organizations such as Etz Chaim and Yesodei HaTorah. We were active members of both Ner Tamid and Suburban Orthodox synagogues. When our oldest child was school age, we made a decision to send her to Yeshivat Rambam, a strongly Zionistic Religious school that incorporates into its curriculum the fundamental ideology of Israel’s language, culture and history. As we continued to grow religiously, so did our feelings for moving to Israel. After years of planning Aliyah, we finally settled in our new Beit Shemesh home in the summer of 2000 - a young community with many other American olim (including several families from Baltimore). Our main points of focus were our children’s absorption, finding jobs, and learning the language. While our children did fine - - they each soon had enough friends to make the Levitas yard and basketball "court" an extremely busy place -- I was not as successful in finding a job in the technology sector. The problem for me was due to the global technology crash – which did not help my job prospects. Joyce and I were determined to make our Aliyah work since we knew that this is where we wanted to live. We determined how much time we could continue to burn our savings in order to build a startup business that could support our family. We brainstormed on various business concepts. After a couple years of refining our business model with a few false starts, we finally developed a business model that worked. Our business is centered on two technology-based products – one an e-Newsletter service, the other, a do-it-yourself dynamic website tool to allow schools and non-profit organizations to quickly create and maintain their own websites. While Joyce handles the software development side of the business, I’m responsible for the business development and customer support. Our first break came after calls to contacts in organizations where we had volunteered while living in Baltimore. We were able to launch our e-Newsletter business concept with customers throughout the Baltimore Jewish community. Today, our service has expanded beyond Baltimore to include federations and schools in New York , New Jersey , Washington D.C. and California. |