‘It turns out that when a pregnant woman is injured, the embryo helps her recover. That’s insane’

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Jordan McCarthy, 23; lives in Haifa, flying to Rome

Hi Jordan, how was your vacation in Israel?

The truth is I live in Israel; I moved here 10 months ago from Boston. I’m a master’s student in the biology faculty of the Technion, in the laboratory of Dr. Yaron Fuchs. It’s an incredible lab, and the tuition is a lot more affordable than in the United States, so that’s another reason I’m here.

Do people call you “Yarden” [the Hebrew version of Jordan] here?

No! I tried to get people to call me that, but everyone calls me “Jordan.”

So you’re not flying to Boston for a home visit.

No, I’m going to Europe. I’ll start in Rome, then I’ll visit the hometown of my mother’s family in Sicily. After Sicily, I’ll go to Switzerland to meet friends, then Portugal, France, Berlin, and then back to my studies in Haifa.

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Why did your family leave Sicily?

I think they were just very poor, and there were better opportunities in the United States. It’s funny that I moved from the U.S. for better opportunities here. It’s a changing world.

How was the move, actually?

I love Haifa. It’s a mixed city, it has everything. I can travel half an hour to Acre or go to Tel Aviv and feel like I’m on vacation. In the U.S., there’s no way you can do that – travel just a little and feel like you’re in a completely different place. Haifa’s also a city that’s easy to walk around in, which is also not usual in the States. I really feel like I’m part of the place.

What are you studying?

I’m doing research on stem cells. Stem cells are the future; they can develop into every kind of cell of the body. Specifically, I’m researching stem cells during pregnancy. We discovered that women who had a heart attack when they were pregnant had a small advantage in recovery, and we wanted to understand why. It turns out that when a pregnant woman is injured, the embryo will send stem cells to the injured part of her body, which expedites the recovery. That was discovered, because a woman usually has two X [female sex] chromosomes, but if she is pregnant with a male, both an X chromosome and a Y [male sex] chromosome will be found in the injured area. It’s insane, I’m astounded that we discovered that. We don’t know how they move to the injured part, and we don’t know what brings them there, but we know that they’re there.

It’s wild – the embryo actually keeps its mother alive?

Yes! So the question is whether it’s altruism, or whether the embryos are selfish and want to ensure their own survival by safeguarding the mother who is carrying them.

What do you think?

I think they’re selfish. So that’s my project here, and the Technion is giving me an excellent opportunity to study it in an amazing lab. We’re not the first group to study it, but we are getting into stem-cell research pretty early on, and it seems to be very meaningful and fascinating.

What is the future? Where will stem cells end up?

In our body. Totally. I also see us using the stem cells that are already inside us. One of the mistaken conceptions about stem cells is that they only exist in the embryo, but each of us has billions of them right now. They’re in the skin, in the liver, in the brain. The research is very advanced and it continues to advance all the time. The thing is regulation. We need regulation at the governmental level in order to implant stem cells in people. It’s a slow process. A therapy that is focused on stem cells might arrive only 25 years after the initial scientific breakthrough; it might be based on technology that was discovered decades earlier.

As someone who’s closely involved with the subject, what’s your take on the skepticism about the COVID-19 vaccines?

I see it on Facebook every day. People are hesitant because of the short time it took [to develop the vaccine]. I can say myself that it generally does take more time, but the technology behind it is very safe. It’s hard to describe it in accessible language – I always think how I would explain it to my grandmother. I told the whole family to get vaccinated, and they all did.

Ester Gonopolsky and Sonya IshenkoTomer Appelbaum

Ester Gonopolsky, 24, and Sonya Ishenko, 37, from Jerusalem and Petah Tikva, respectively; arriving from Boryspil, Ukraine

Hi, I can’t figure out what the connection is between you two.

Sonya: We’re sisters, 13 years apart.

What were you doing in Ukraine?

Sonya: We went to Kropyvnytskyi, the city where I was born, only then it was called Kirovohrad. I came to Israel when I was 8, and Eti was born here.

How was the trip?

Ester: Hot.

Sonya: And there are no air conditioners, not even on the train.

Ester: But it was amazing there. Obviously I didn’t have the same nostalgia as Sonya did, because I was never in those places, but it was a beautiful experience. I’d heard a lot of stories, so at least I got to feel it a bit.

Sonya: We were also in all the holy places. We went to the synagogue that my father established – he got a permit to use a building as a synagogue – before that it was a library. We were in the cemetery.

Ester: We looked among the underbrush to see who’s buried where.

Do the headstones have inscriptions in Hebrew?

Sonya: No, there are maybe one or two headstones in Hebrew. They are people who were buried in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, who did whatever they could not to be considered Jews, even though they are buried in the Jewish section. So there’s Feldman and Miklin and Barbinsky, but the names are written in Russian. They were Soviets, even though they were Jews.

What do you mean, “even though”?

Sonya: My great-grandmother, for whom I am named, always had a separate pot for milk. She didn’t remember why, she only remembered that you don’t eat rabbit and that there’s a separate pot for milk. That was as far as the Judaism went. But she cried when Stalin died. When we got to Israel, my grandfather Ilya heard the language and suddenly he remembered a blessing that he had learned in heder before World War II – “shehakol nihyah b’dvaro’ [said over certain foods]. Beyond that he was a Soviet soldier, someone who was part of the system.

I imagine that you also have some sort of association with Judaism.

Sonya: I just like skirts. I wouldn’t define myself as religious; we’re more traditional. I don’t observe Shabbat anymore, but we do Kabbalat Shabbat [ceremony to welcome Sabbath]. When we came to Israel, it was out of Zionist motives. It was clear to my father that now we would be religious, because that’s how Jews behave. We went to religious schools, and he wore a kippa until he discovered the kabbala [Jewish mysticism].

Discovered the kabbala?

Sonya: My father looked for meaning in life. Religion didn’t give him good enough answers, so he found the first Russian edition of the book by Rabbi [Michael] Laitman, who spread the wisdom of the kabbala; it was his mission. Dad read the book and called Bnei Baruch [kabbala association founded by Laitman] to ask whether there were more books… In the end we moved from Safed to the center of the country, to be closer to the Bnei Baruch kabbala center. That was in 1997, when she [Ester] was born.

I know it a little. There are huge gatherings there, you get up in the middle of the night to study kabbala, you give a tithe.

Sonya: A tithe is only recommended. Bnei Baruch has had a website since 1995. Anyone who searches for “kabbala” or for “meaning of life” finds it there. As far as getting up in the middle of the night… some people get up, others don’t. It’s a time that’s free of all kinds of alien thoughts. Kabbalists always studied in the morning, before dawn.

You must have heard that some people call Bnei Baruch a cult.

Sonya: So, I’m speaking for myself, as someone who grew up with and chose this way of life. It’s not the only thing I do. I have a family, a business, and I am developing in other areas. To say it’s a cult is like taking people who live in the heart of Tel Aviv and have a sort of hedonistic viewpoint, and saying, “That’s a hedonistic cult.” No – it’s a person who chose to live like that. Especially since the [kabbala] community was never closed to people who wanted to leave. If a person decides it’s not for them, why waste your time? Let them go and enjoy life.