GLOVERSVILLE - While Antonina Rosa Naveh has made new ties across the world in Israel, her roots remain firmly grounded in the city where she grew up as part of an immigrant family from Europe.
Even though the 63-year-old social worker has struggled to define her true home for most of her life, having to struggle with personal tragedies and feeling like an outsider as she tried to adapt to new cultures as an immigrant, she says Gloversville's small-town feel will live in her soul no matter where she goes.
"When you go home again, it's never the same, but it's imprinted on your soul," Naveh said.
Nearly 10 years ago, Naveh became the director of a therapeutic center for children and parents in Sderot, Israel, a city with a large immigrant population that has been the victim of Qassam missile attacks.
The city is located less than a mile from the Gaza Strip. For much of the last decade, Naveh has heard the Hebrew voice of a woman over the citywide loudspeakers, declaring "color red," which means to hurry to the closest bunker.
Last week, Naveh returned to Fulton County for her Gloversville High School class reunion. It's a different city from the one with a bustling four corners and the doors of every storefront open wide that she remembers. Nevertheless, it was a sweet homecoming for Naveh, who said growing up in a small city shaped her life.
"Sderot appealed to me because it reminded me of Gloversville," she said. "It's like a small village and I have a terrible longing to move to these places."
The concept of roots and tradition are what guides the center that Naveh directs.
In a poem, "Once Upon a Time," Naveh wrote that "once, families provided roots. Today, everyone seems to be looking for their roots."
The Center for Children and Families is a place where, in a world of high-tech gadgets and, in Sderot, upheaval of daily life because of violence, families find "simplicity, naturalness, and receive love from each other," Naveh wrote.
She described the center as an office space that was transformed into a homelike atmosphere, almost an oasis for its patients, who she said return after their treatment is finished, to volunteer and socialize.
The center serves at least 100 people each year, the minimum number required to receive a budget from the welfare services in Sderot.
"It's a model that's really interesting," Naveh said. "It wasn't intimidating to start it because it grew out of me. You're not trying to make it successful, you're simple creating something that's a part of you. It's like an artist who paints a picture."
Naveh said the center includes a kitchen and is decorated with homey furniture and items that people who have been treated by the center have brought from home to add to its community atmosphere. Families gather there to celebrate holidays as a community, she said.
In June, she won the Spitzer Prize for Excellence and Innovation in the Field of Social Welfare from the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.
She said the award was much more than simple recognition. It was like her citizen's papers. It gave validity to her unconventional ideas. She had been nominated by a former student who studied her nontraditional methods of therapy, a less formal approach to helping families get through their daily lives.
"It gave me a kind of citizenship," she said.
Naveh's parents met in Poland after the Allied powers split Europe after World War II, she said. Both survived Nazi concentration camps. "They never talked about that much," she said.
They moved to an American-occupied section of southern Germany, where Naveh was born, and then the family immigrated to the United States where they settled in Gloversville, drawn by Naveh's father's experience working with leather.
Naveh described growing up in a house across from the St. Mary of Mount Carmel Church on South Main Street in the city, where she attended kindergarten classes. She said as an immigrant, she had to develop an ability to adapt to her surroundings.
"I had two worlds," she said. "I would go to confession with my Catholic friends and they would do their Hail Marys and Our Fathers, and then I'd come home and everyone was speaking Yiddish."
Naveh's father battled cancer twice, dying from it in 1968. She said before that, her parents dealt with feelings of loneliness when the only two other immigrant families they knew moved away from Gloversville.
Her mother lived with Naveh's uncle in Colonie after that and then died in 1985.
Naveh went on to earn a bachelor's degree in German literature from the State University of New York at Albany and a master's degree in social work from Boston University in 1973.
Shortly after, she married and moved with her then-husband to Israel in 1978. She now has a daughter, 32, and a son, 28, who live and grew up in Israel.
Naveh's Center for Children and Families in Sderot today deals with the same issues her family grappled with in Gloversville - a sense of identity and firmly ground roots when a sense of stability is so difficult to grasp.
When she was in fourth grade, she met her lifelong friend, Chellie (Wise) Gorgos, now of Saratoga Springs, at a day camp. The Wise family would become her adoptive family and their home, like her "second home," she said.
"When my father died in 1968, their home became my first home," she said.
Solomon Wise, Gorgos' father, said he and his wife, Betty, consider Naveh the same as one of their own children. The Wises attended Naveh's college graduation and helped her move to Boston when she started her graduate school studies.
"It's probably one of the highlights of my life to have her as an addition to our family," Wise said.
Amanda Whistle can be reached at montco@leaderherald.com.
