Iowa to Jerusalem: With 4 dogs in cargo, Binghams oozed joy on arrival in Promised Land

Last week’s Nefesh B’Nefesh flight — the group’s first ElAl charter since the Oct. 7 invasion — carried a diverse group of 225 olim.

Those returning home were tech workers and teachers, lone soldiers, physicians and other healthcare professionals, children and retirees, baalei teshuva and frum-from-birth, observant and traditional. They came from 10 states and one Canadian province.

One of those states is Iowa, the quintessential “flyover” state that is rarely stumbled upon in the game of Jewish geography.

Linda and William Bingham followed their son, a professor at the Technion in Haifa, who made aliyah on the last Nefesh charter flight before the war.

“He said, ‘come on, just do it’.”

For 15 years, the Binghams lived in Fairfield, a town of 9,500 in southeast Iowa that is an international center for Transcendental Meditation and home to Maharishi University. The town, which Linda said “might” have 300 Jews, is a 2-hour drive to the Maccabee’s Kosher Deli in Des Moines, the state capital. It’s not a hub of thriving yiddishkayt,

The journey that culminated in the Binghams’ moving to Haifa was complicated — at least a bit — by the fact that they were bringing along their four dogs, who traveled in cargo and were happily reunited at Ben Gurion airport.

“I have worked with Nefesh B’Nefesh on so many different issues, and every single time they handle the logistics,” said Linda Bingham. “What stood out was the way they made us feel welcome and comfortable.”

When they visited their son in Haifa during the war, “we never experienced a community where I felt so welcome and so safe and so looked after, total strangers trying to help us.”

William Bingham, who has worked in information technology across industries and also taught, hopes to teach in Israel. Linda said her dream job would be with Nefesh B’Nefesh helping new olim.

The olim on last week’s flight join over 90,000 who have made aliyah with the assistance of Nefesh and its partners since its inception in 2002.

August was set to see more than 1,000 new immigrants arriving in Israel, the highest monthly total in over 20 years, Nefesh said. Since the events of Oct. 7, over 7,000 new immigrants from North America have made aliyah, underscoring an extraordinary commitment to the Zionist dream in the face of ongoing regional conflict, it added.

“These olim are fulfilling their dream of making Israel their home,” said Nefesh Co-Founder and Chairman Tony Gelbart.

“People are not running away from anything,” he said, alluding to a well-document increase in antisemitism in the Diaspora. “They’re running to something, they’re running to Israel [where] they’re going to contribute right away, right when they hit the ground.”

That so many Jews are making aliyah while Israel is engaged in a protract war “is a strong message,” Ofir Soffer, Israel’s minister of aliyah and integration, told a reporter. “During a war people escape from a country. But Jewish people are coming to Israel.”

Nefesh emphasized that it would not be successful in all it does without its parter organizations — Israel’s Ministry of Aliyah and Integration, the Jewish Agency for Israel, Keren Kayemeth LeIsrael, and JNF-USA.

See also:

•Nefesh B'Nefesh co-founders see eye-to-eye as they work to help every Jew come home

•Nachum Segal's 'JM in the AM' program broadcast from aboard the aliah charter flight.