Michelle Cohen Corasanti

Follow The Almond Tree

Facebook
TwitterMichelle Cohen Corasanti grew up in a Jewish home in which German cars were boycotted and Israeli bonds were plentiful. Other than the blue-and-white tin Jewish National Fund sedakah box her family kept in the kitchen and the money they would give to plant trees in Israel, all she learned growing up was that after the Holocaust, the Jews found a land without a people for a people without a land and made the desert bloom.Until third grade, Michelle attended public school and then she transferred to the Hillel Yeshiva. The greatest lesson Michelle feels she learned at this Yeshiva was articulated by Rabbi Hillel (30BC-10AD), one of the greatest rabbis of the Talmudic era in his famous quote, “That which is hateful to you, do not unto another. This is the whole Torah. The rest is commentary.” There were two students in her sixth grade graduating class.Michelle returned to public school for seventh grade, stopped wearing skirts with pants underneath and re-befriended her former best friend whom she had lost touch with during her yeshiva years. Her friend’s father had since died, her mother turned into a raging alcoholic and her older brothers spent most of their time in their bedrooms listening to Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds in a state Michelle still was too young to recognize. Michelle’s friend lived without rules as she had no supervision. Just what every teenage girl wants and what every parent doesn’t.Being the oldest and the only daughter in the family, Michelle’s parents’ strictness suffocated her. She decided she wanted to study abroad in Paris in order to get distance from her parental-choke-hold. Her Zionist parents rejected that idea and sent Michelle to Israel to study Judaism and Hebrew with the Rabbi’s perfectly well-behaved and obedient daughter Miriam. Michelle was sixteen-years-old and the year was 1982.Despite having come from Utica, New York, the transition to the Ben Shemen Boarding School was effortless for Michelle. She soon had an Israeli boyfriend. When he told her he was a Kahanist, she had no idea what he was talking about. “I believe in transfer,” he told her. “There are 21 Arab countries, the Pal