Free Therapy for Aliyah Blues

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Why pay a therapist when a good laugh can do wonders. There's help for that post-aliyah depression - just around the corner at Daniella Ashkenazy's open-all-night 'pharmacy for the soul'. Every oleh/olah encounters rough spots when they wonder what they're doing in this crazy country - remembering the over rosy-cosy pictures of the future they had back home, the excitement of the first month or first year (each of us has their own breaking point). Alas, acculturation is a process that doesn't happen overnight (I was once a new immigrant, I know). Every oleh desperately needs a reason a laugh from time to time - even if it may be a hollow one. For that much-needed laugh there is a solution: Log on to CHELM-ON-THE-MED© ONLINE www.chelm-on-the-med.com.* Why? When it comes to the "craziness of living in Israel" – never a dull moment, exasperating and inexplicable at times, particularly for newcomers – it is nice to know that even veteran Israelis not just olim can find themselves in the jaws of the bureaucracy, fighting Kafka-like ordinances or administrative decisions, or just chutzbadike behavior – like the condo in Tel Aviv that found that for years the municipality had connected an adjacent public park to their water meter, then refused to readjust their huge water bills, or the matron whose car was stolen while hosting a penny poker game with her girlfriends whose insurance company refused to cover her loss saying she was running a "gambling house" (which she had failed to cited on her insurance application) because she served refreshments... And on the other hand, there are the stories on Chelm-on-the-Med© Online that will remind you "what you are doing here" – such as the re-possessor who came to take the frig from a poor family, took one look inside the mostly-empty frig, scribbled 'nothing to repossess' on the court order, took out his wallet, handed the head of the household a 100 NIS note and walked out the door. Or the cops at a Ashkelon police station who (