From Atheist Traveler to Israeli Immigrant: One Man’s Awakening

Until October 7^th, Steve Tsentserensky considered himself an atheist, politically liberal and generally opposed to any organized religion. As a marketer and copywriter, he trekked around the globe until he witnessed the world turn against him and his people. Feeling like he was in the wilderness, suddenly adrift and untethered from his own life, Steve reconnected with the Jewish community and his heritage and eventually moved to Israel.

Growing Up in Cleveland

Steve was born in the 1980s in Cleveland, OH. His parents were Jewish immigrants from the Soviet Union who had escaped from Moscow to freedom at the first opportunity. Steve knew that his parents’ life under Soviet rule had been fraught with danger and antisemitism was ever present.

Once in America, Steve’s parents occasionally attended a Conservative synagogue, classic “high-holiday Jews” as he puts it, and sent their children to its Sunday school and to a Jewish summer camp. Though Steve enjoyed camp, he found the synagogue services oppressive. “There was no light or life in it,” he recalls. “Every experience was more like, let’s finish this thing so we can leave. And it was super annoying to wake up on the weekend and go to Sunday school.”

Steve’s parents insisted that he have a bar mitzvah. “The deal was that you have to get a bar mitzvah, and then you never have to set foot in a synagogue ever again. I took the deal. And true to form, I basically didn’t go to synagogue for the next 25 years.”

His parents no longer pressured him but would sometimes remark, “You’re going to find out that you are Jewish one day, whether you like it or not.”

Traveling the World

By 28 years old he was working aboard cruise ships, he’d already lived in multiple states and other countries before that and was permanently on the move without a home of his own. Steve explored Jewish historical sites in that time, but his interest was purely cultural.

Israel was not very high on the list of places Steve wanted to visit. But at the age of 26, he realized he was approaching the cutoff date for participating in a free Birthright program. He signed up for “the most secular trip.”

“It was really fun,” he recalls, “but I looked at as a propagandized sort of thing, only showing us the very best of everything.” Nevertheless, there were moments of the trip when Steve witnessed other people’s genuine devotion and was moved by it. “In Jerusalem’s Old City, I saw people bawling their eyes out. It was a palpable thing, that you could feel their spirituality. And just seeing the actual holiest place for us, I was awestruck that it existed. There is something different when you are physically there.”

The trip did not have a lasting effect. “I was too immature to work through these feelings,” Steve says. Continuing with somewhat of a vagabond lifestyle, he started doing marketing for cruise lines, taking care of on board digital marketing and content creation, while producing travel and music videos between contracts.

By 2019, Steve felt that he wanted to settle on dry land.

During Covid in 2020, he shifted his career to copywriting, and since he was working remotely, he could live anywhere in the world. Having taken a liking to Croatia after a chance trip with someone he’d met onboard, he rented an apartment in Zagreb, intending to stay there for the foreseeable future.

Enjoying his work and making friends, he felt comfortable in Croatia. Then October 7^th happened.

In the Aftermath of October 7^th

On the morning of October 7^th, Steve saw on the news that a terror attack took place in Israel but he didn’t perceive it as anything unusual. Unfortunately, such news had been coming out of Israel on a regular basis.

It was only later in the day that he understood the extent of Hamas’s unprecedented murderous attack. He was glued to his phone, “just scrolling through the worst stuff and then seeing almost immediate antisemitism. The second the attack happened, I was already seeing people blaming the Jews and Israel for this and that.”

Steve was shocked by the scale and the cruelty of the attack, but even more, “shocked to my core by the intense antisemitic response. There was no support that I saw from anybody towards Israel. I hadn’t realized the degree to which people had, right beneath their skin, ready-to-deploy antisemitism. They just needed an excuse, and in that moment, it became normalized somehow. There were people I knew personally who by the end of the day already had Palestinian flags on their profiles. There hadn’t been any retaliation yet, the bodies are still warm, and I’ve seen people already doing this.”

Steve then understood what his parents had meant when they told him that he’d find out one day that he was Jewish. “The world will remind you,” he says.

Reevaluating Political Views

Steve had been politically on the left. “They seemed to care more about people,” he says. “All these social rights movements were appealing.” He had many friends among minority communities and considered himself a minority as a Jew. “I didn’t realize that none of them looked at Jews as minorities until October 8^th,” he says.

“I remember when the Black Lives Matter protests happened, I was very supportive of it,” Steve recalls. “And I still understand what that movement was about, but it got co-opted by the more radical voices that didn’t care and just were using it as a proxy for other things, which is what’s happening today too.”

Back in the days of BLM protests, Steve remembers having lengthy conversations with friends who were affected, seeing how they were doing and checking in. After October 7^th, essentially none of his friends had done the same for him. And when he tried to initiate a conversation and express his feelings, there would be interruptions and whataboutism, like, “But what about the Palestinians?”

“I was happy to have that conversation” he adds, “but it was incredibly difficult to simply express how it felt to be a Jew in those moments without having to first consider and validate everyone else’s suffering first”

“In a way I thought, ‘it was my group’s turn now, we Jews have a problem’,” Steve says. “But so many on the left said, ‘No, it’s your own fault! And you’re not even a minority! What are you talking about?’ I was baffled. It was full abandonment by the left and the progressives. So that’s when the shift happened for me. I realized that all of that was performative. It’s the lowest hanging fruit of feeling like a good person rather than being a good person. I mean, maybe not all of it. There’s a genuine core of people that care and are really trying to move things in a good direction, but it gets co-opted so easily. And when you see it, it affects you.

“I realized that the left is not as genuinely inclusive as they claim. And when I look on the right, there is diversity of opinions. On the right, if you told people that you voted for Biden or Harris, you won’t get kicked out of your friendship circles. It doesn’t seem to work this way in the opposite direction, especially this last election. You don’t have to police your own thoughts.”

He attempted to defend Israel and fight antisemitism by posting tidbits about Jewish history and Jewish connection to the Land of Israel. At the time, Steve had about 6,500 followers who enjoyed his travel posts. As soon as his posts turned to Israel, his followers began to unfollow him. He lost about a thousand followers in the weeks following October 7^th. The engagement level on his posts also plummeted.

Feeling like he was on an island, Steve said to himself, “I should probably talk to somebody else that’s Jewish.”

Reconnecting with the Jewish Community

Steve found the email of Bet Israel, a Sephardic Modern Orthodox synagogue in Zagreb, Croatia. He reached out and was invited to come visit. Soon, Steve found himself speaking to the synagogue’s rabbi.

They spoke for over an hour. He finally felt heard and understood.

Though Steve still considered himself an atheist, he accepted the rabbi’s invitation for Shabbat services. Given that he hadn’t been to a service in over twenty years he had a hard time following along to say the least.

Croatia’s Jewish community is very small and that Shabbat, there was no minyan which of course meant the congregation did not read from the Torah, only adding to Steve’s confusion. So he did the logical thing, stayed quiet and read hundreds of pages of the Siddur. He stayed for lunch and enjoyed meeting the community members, where they reassured him it was fine to not understand. Simply being there was enough… and to not be afraid to ask questions.

In the following months, Steve continued occasionally attending the Sephardic synagogue, as well as the larger Chabad synagogue, which usually managed to gather a minyan for Shabbat services. “I needed to be around the Jewish community,” Steve recalls. “I felt an urge and a pull to reconnect and to learn things and to rediscover things I already knew.”

Though Steve lost friends over his support of Israel, the new friends he made in the Jewish community more than compensated for this loss. “I gained tremendously,” he says. “In fact, I don’t feel like I lost anything. If anything, I’ve gained the entirety of the Jewish community.”

During that time, Steve began rethinking his atheist views. “I was thinking about how our tiny group, the Jews, has lasted so long. There have been larger groups and societies that have not lasted. It’s absurd that we still exist when we’ve been the object of disdain and persecution for millennia. And yes, we Jews are an inherently stubborn people, but I don’t know if that’s enough of a reason. So maybe Someone is helping us out.”

At that point, Steve made an important decision. He resolved to only date Jewish women. Until then, he’d never dated Jews and never cared whether he married Jewish. After living in Croatia for so many years, he figured his potential future children would be raised nominally Catholic, with maybe a token Hanukkah celebration.

“On a practical level, if I marry somebody that’s not Jewish, my kids wouldn’t be Jewish according to Jewish law and that somehow matters to me a lot now, which it didn’t before. But then, also, there is the journey that I had, that it took me years – over 2 decades – to appreciate my culture, tradition, and religion. The way I’ve been describing it is like on October 7^th I was reminded with the subtlety of a sledgehammer that I was Jewish. And I don’t want that for my kids. I want them to have their core identity built around that from day one.”

Another factor was the odd realization that some of the women he’d previously been potentially interested in were taking staunch anti-Israel stances. Steve wondered if they were antisemitic and was horrified by the thought that he could have married an antisemite and found out about it much too late.

“That’s not workable,” he says. “There are certain things that I would want in a mother of my children that are non-negotiable, and that is that we are Jewish and I don’t have to explain my identity to anybody. When you combine all those things, it just didn’t make any sense to not seek somebody that’s within the faith.”

Volunteering in Israel

When Steve saw that his attempts to help Israel online were not reaching his intended audience, he decided to do something more tangible. He signed up for a volunteer mission in Israel.

Once in Israel, Steve felt at home almost immediately. It was March 2024, and there were still relatively few visitors to Israel. “But you were still seeing life happening,” says Steve. “I went out for a run at 6 in the morning, thinking no one was going to be out, but it was packed! People were just living and going to work. Very conscious of the war, because you can’t go five meters without seeing a hostage poster. So it’s this dual reality, where everyone is hyper focused on what’s going with the war, but then life was happening also. That was the first thing I saw – Jewish perseverance, and also joy. Kind of like best revenge is living well.”

When Steve had signed up for the volunteer program, he had specifically requested to be placed with adults rather than young college students. To his consternation, when he arrived, he discovered that only the guide was close to his age. The rest were Orthodox college students from America. The guide and Steve became friends and continue to stay in touch.

Despite his initial disappointment about being 15 years older than the rest of the participants, Steve was nonetheless excited to be doing what he could to help Israel. It turned out that being around young, religious American Jews was an eye-opening experience.

On Friday night, the students invited Steve to come with them to the Great Synagogue of Tel Aviv. “We go in as a group, and the first thing I recall is that the door was just open. There was no security. There were cameras, but no one was stopping you from entering to pray. That was immediately jarring because [in Europe], to visit a synagogue, you have to go through metal detectors and there are cops driving around the Jewish area all the time.”

#What I experienced for the first time was joyous Judaism.

But what impressed Steve even more was the palpable joy and excitement in that synagogue. “What I experienced for the first time was joyous Judaism,” he says. “There was singing and dancing and an abundance of uplifting things happening.” It was a huge contrast to Steve’s childhood experience of Judaism, which felt oppressive and dry.

An older man was giving out candies to the children and Steve was moved by the sight. “There was a real community,” he recalls. “And they were happy and elated to be bringing in Shabbat.”

Other experiences in Israel also led Steve closer to a belief in God. When he visited the ANU museum in Tel Aviv, he saw a touch display of synagogues throughout the world. When he clicked on Ohio, the synagogue that appeared on the screen was the very same one where Steve had his bar mitzvah. “I had goosebumps,” he says. “Is it like a cosmic wink?”

Hearing stories of Jewish survival, both recently and throughout history, also led Steve to think, “Someone must have had a hand in this.”

Moving to Israel

During his stay in Israel, the thought of moving there had crossed Steve’s mind often. On his return to Croatia, he no longer felt at home and was longing to return to Israel. “Croatia didn’t change,” he says. “I changed.”

Within a year, Steve was thrilled to come back to Israel for good as an immigrant.

Since February, he has been living in Tel Aviv. He continues to work from home and in his free time, he enjoys getting to know his new neighbors and his surroundings. “Everyone here is insanely welcoming,” he says. “Tel Aviv is the easiest landing place in that sense because it’s so international.”

Steve also enjoys experiencing Shabbat and Jewish holidays. He receives frequent Shabbat invitations, which he is happy to accept.

“I’ve heard a quote before, but I never understood what it meant,” he says. “It’s not that Jews keep Shabbat, it’s that Shabbat keeps the Jews. Even in hyper-secular Tel Aviv, people ‘got to do Shabbat.’ Now I understand what it means – these rituals, these small details of Jewish life, are what keep us, and Shabbat is a beacon of that in a lot of ways. It’s the simplest and the most profound.”

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