Michal Goldschmidt made aliyah in September 2023. She caught COVID-19 on the plane and spent her first week in Israel in bed, followed by a week of running around to government ministries. And then came Oct. 7.

Yet she never considered going back to London. “You just have to keep going. I thought if I went home, I’d never come back,” she admits.

Fortunately, she had something special to look forward to in Israel – her wedding, in December 2023. She had met French-born Ezra Margulies when he was a student at Oxford University several years before. After he made aliyah they kept in touch, and eventually the romance blossomed into an engagement.

“I made aliyah for him. It was always just a question of who’s moving. And I’d committed to giving it a real shot,” she says.

Relocating proved difficult professionally for Goldschmidt, who has a PhD in art history and worked as a curator at London’s Tate Gallery.

“When I made aliyah, I had a museum gift-shop book coming out in March 2024 called The Art of Fashion, and I was going to take a few months to network while working on the final rounds of editing. But I did not find that people in the museum world here were particularly interested in hiring me; I didn’t seem to be the right fit,” she recounts.

“So I thought, okay, relying on other people taking a chance on me is not working. I can’t sit at home and say I used to be a museum curator. After a while, I had to find a way to build my own life and help myself be as happy and satisfied as I can be living here.”

Goldschmidt hit on the idea of opening a bookshop serving the Anglo population of Greater Tel Aviv.

“I’ve always loved reading, buying, and recommending books. In Tel Aviv, there’s a good secondhand bookshop in English, but in terms of finding new books, none of the options are pleasant browsing experiences. I really struggle here because I observe Shabbat and read on my Kindle during the week, but on Shabbat I feel sad because I prefer reading a physical book,” she says.

“I wanted to create a space that would be beautiful and welcoming, with English books for children and adults; an independent shop with friendly customer service, where you could sit and have a drink with friends – a kind of gathering space for olim.”

Goldschmidt had no retail experience. “I asked everyone, including ChatGPT, a lot of questions. Fellow olim were helpful and put me in touch with local business owners who were extremely generous in sharing knowledge. Also, the municipality has an open clinic where you can go in without an appointment and ask questions about starting a business.” 

Her shop and community café, Bookhaus Tel Aviv, opened ON January 1 at 113 Ben-Yehuda Street after several months of readying the rented space, procuring inventory by sea and air, filing paperwork for a café license (still pending), hiring sales staff, and engaging former literary agent Jessica Kasmer Jacobs to serve as director of events.

The Old North location is exactly where Goldschmidt identified the largest potential customer base.

“I walked around that area, and any time I saw a space for rent, I’d call. As a millennial trained never to call anyone, and then having to call and speak to gruff Israelis, was challenging. But the agent really liked the idea, so it fell into place easily.”

Barely two months after opening, however, the conflict with Iran presented challenges for her fledgling shop, located about a minute away from a bomb shelter. Inventory from overseas was delayed, and then arrived all at once. Plans to start events and a children’s story hour had to be put on hold.

“We were closed for the beginning of the war. When we were allowed to reopen, we did less than 25% of the business we’d done in January and February. I spent a lot of time locking and unlocking the shop when we had missiles,” Goldschmidt says. “Sometimes, I’d be open for two hours, and during that time there would be three missiles.”

Happily, a week into the ceasefire, the pace was picking up again. Goldschmidt also sees new customers due to launching an international service, where people can buy Bookhaus vouchers online, in any currency, as gifts for Tel Aviv-based friends or relatives.

The shop isn’t Goldschmidt’s only new venture. She also has a one-year-old daughter. She speaks to the baby in English; her husband speaks to her in French, so that she’ll be able to communicate with members of his family who speak neither English nor Hebrew.

Goldschmidt loves taking her baby out for walks in Tel Aviv’s year-round beautiful weather (“In London, I’d have to put my daughter in the car to go anywhere,” she points out) and has found a warm community of young internationals at the Yakar Tel Aviv synagogue led by Rabbi Chananel Rosen.

But she admits that the missiles raining down from Iran last June and in March made life difficult. “I wouldn’t wish Tel Aviv during this past war on anyone. There’s no way of sugarcoating it. It was hellish,” she says.

However, Goldschmidt makes a distinction between safety and comfort when comparing her overall situation to that of London, where her parents live, or New York, where her brother lives.

“In June, missiles were landing at the end of the street I live on. That means it’s not safer here. But there’s the comfort of being able to walk into a neighborhood café and say something to the person behind the counter about how sad you are about the situation. In England or America, you couldn’t share in that way because you couldn’t assume the person would have a similar investment in the story,” she explains.

“I also think, after the Manchester attack [last Yom Kippur], that there’s a sense of how random violence can be. You can try to do the thing you think is safer, but at the end of the day you may still be in danger. You have to make the choices that you think are best for you.”

For Goldschmidt and her husband, that choice is Tel Aviv.

Bookhaus is open Sunday-Thursday, noon-6 p.m.; Friday, 11 a.m.-2 p.m. For more information, go to bookhaus.co.il.
Michal Goldschmidt, 35, From London to Tel Aviv, 2023