pppxxxx■]■t■]■oajestic sic) (fireworks popping) (horse whinnying) - thank god - there we go. we're in. - and as far as israelis go, the terrifying moments should be starting now. - and i'm totally relaxed, yeah.

- the checkpoints were a dangerous place to be for everybody. for 10 years, i lived in two completely different worlds, israeli and palestinian, daily going through checkpoints, never knowing what would happen or could happen on either side. (elegant music) - this is the dream room. this is where all the plans were made, that there was something about this place that made me feel that i could do anything. to get to the olympics, to be the best rider possible.

you know, you just imagine you're on your horse, bareback, 15, 16, 17 years old. it was like a holy spot, reap it all in and then go and try to put it into practice. (elegantusic) let me tell you a little bit about this horse. she's four and she's been under saddle for about a year. so basically she's still a baby, still working with her on basic stuff, but what we're trying to do is get her into balance, get her rhythm steady and even. (hooves clomping) so i started telling her, okay, sweetheart, this is what i want. i want you to move forwards when i use my leg, and then you have this conversation and this negotiation

and you build a relationship of trust. good girl. how i got to israel. okay, well, we were living in california at the time. i was born in la jolla and we were living in san diego, and when i was nine, my parents collected myself and my two brothers and sisters into the living room and told us that we were going to israel, and i said, i'm not going unless you buy me a horse, and he did, he bought the horse. he couldn't afford it, but he bought the horse. (nancy knocking on door) - oh, hi there, nancy. - hi dad. - who's that knocking at my door? - it's your daughter. hi mom. - hello. - how you doing? - i came to israel because of my wife. we came in 1950 to israel.

we went up to the kibbutz sassa up in the north. we spent a week or two there. esther was the one that really wanted to stay in israel. - i realized that i was at home in this kibbutz dining room. there was nothing to eat, hardly, but i felt i was in the family that i belonged to be in. - i promised her that we will come back someday, but i had to go back to america and go to work. that's what a nice jewish boy does. worked at atomic energy center in oak ridge, tennessee for four years, became a nuclear engineer there, one of the first of 300 at that time, and then we moved to san diego for the last 10 years before immigrating. my identity as a jew was one that i wanted to maintain that identity, and i want to assure that our children would not intermarry. living in israel seemed to be part of it.

- i had friends in the states, i was riding regularly, swimming pool in the background, christmas trees and hannukah bushes and everything was perfect, and when we came here, it was, i hated it for two years. from day one, horses were my savior and it was just horses, horses, horses, and a lot of drawing american flags in notebooks at school, but with time you learn the language you learn what the country's about and you gradually adapt and adopt. - a horse is probably one of the most sensitive creatures on earth, and because they're so, so sensitive, they can read you so well. when you just come and touch them, they can read you. they know who you are. the movement of your hips will determine the length of the stride and the speed.

i train people to the highest levels in dressage and in jumping. now, be very careful with your right leg. that's your bad leg so. i really enjoy working with people with disabilities. good. - dror and i have known each other since we were kids, since we were 12. we were both kids growing up in the horse world. - she at the time was riding in a big club, in a jockey club and i was from a kibbutz, you know, so we had the not so nice horses and not so nice equipment, and they had the fancy horses and the fancy equipment, and, you know, she was doing very well. - this is the building that we moved into in 1970. this is where most of our childhood was spent. our next door neighbors were the pereses, shimon and sonia peres and their three children, chemi, yoni, and tsvia. - well, she was a very special person and i thought she'd be the world champion in horse riding.

i liked her a lot and we were sort of close, i think, for a while. (men and women speaking hebrew) when the family moved to ramat aviv, it was in the golden days between '67 and '73. we were riding the wave of euphoria after the six days' war. the palestinian problem was not a big issue at the time. the generals were the heroes and we felt quite secure. so when you get a notion that you can, in six days, finish the job or complete the task, it gives you a notion that there's no limit to what you can do. - we didn't know it was arrogant. we just thought that we were invincible. - nothing can stop you actually.

- and the 1973 yom kippur war broke out when i was 15 and chemi was 15. (gunfire ricocheting) at two o'clock, the siren went off and the yom kippur war had started as a surprise attack against israel, and it was meant to annihilate israel. it broke everything from a problem-free, happy childhood. you found yourself at the age of 15 going to funerals. there was a complete loss of confidence in the leadership of the country. - and you started to ask questions. where is it heading, a how resilient are we? when are we going to be really safe? - and as every group of stab kids have their leader, the star was arik toren, who was killed in the yom kippur war. (eerie music)

(children speaking hebrew) (nancy speaking hebrew) (somber music)

i was drafted into the paratroope, and in order to get your wings, you had to jump out three times. i never broke my leg on a horse. it was ironic that i broke my leg jumping out of a plane, and after my service was over, i left israel and started my equestrian career. - and when i finished my army service, three years, immediately, i went to england. - i met nancy many years ago, i would say probably 45 years ago in some of the stables to the north of tel aviv. we were both horse enthusiasts and the horse sport in israel was not developed at all at that time. nancy trained in europe because there were no facilities in israel at all, no trainers.

- the period in holland in, from 1982 to 1983 was the most intensive period as far as dressage training. i was shortlisted for the 1984 olympics, but as with many other motivated riders, we ran out of money, but the period was during the first lebanese war. it was in 1982. all of the individuals and the companies in israel were busy with supporting hospitals. nobody really had the time of day to listen to a story about a girl who wants to ride in the olympics. alisa simon, who was in charge of this whole operation of getting me to the olympics, and she told me i have to pack my bags, put the horse on the plane and come back home. three weeks before i came back home, i met frankie in belgium.

we fell in love. i came back to israel and frankie followed two weeks later. - although i was successful in what i was doing in england and had a lot of friends, once in a while you go somewhere and somebody is saying something not so nice because you are an israeli or a jew or whatever, and then you think, yeah, i don't want to raise my kids here, and that was the reason, i believe. - we're the same age, dror and i, when we both finished our years of training abroad and basically came back to israel and that was the beginning of 10 very intensive years of being part of the horse world in israel, building it, setting up infrastructures, writing a rule book, applying for membership in the fei. the bond that we have with horses is just magical. it's inexplicable. (elegant music) (yael speaking hebrew)

yael for me is the whole package. she's professional, she's honest, she's hard working. from the beginning, you could see how talented she was. she would prove herself over the years to become one of the best riders in israel. (yael speaking hebrew) what a person would be seeing when they see a good rider ride is the unity, and hopefully the invisibility of the riders aids their actions. you want to see the horse. so your challenge as a rider is to bond with the horse

in such a way that they want to cooperate. they allow themselves to submit, and there's that ability to form a partnership with them as athletes. - nancy and i competed in the high jump competition in the south of israel in the mid-'80s. it's one of the only puissance competitions that we had at the time. - you could have three attempts at this jump. i approached it the first time, totally chickened out. just turned the horse away. i was so terrified. one meter 75 looked like the empire state building to me. it was huge, and the second time i approached the jump, i had a misunderstanding, a miscalculation.

came around the third time, said, it's now or never. i got the striding right, i got the energy right, got the balance right, and we cleared it. when you clear a jump like that, and you've never jumped that high, it feels like you just touched heaven, and i held that high jump, this israeli high jump record for 20 years. my professional life and career over the years has been fascinating and highly successful. my personal life, on the other hand, has been somewhat of an obstacle course. so these are some of my clothes over the years. i'm gonna start out by showing you this beautiful designer dress. i wore this to frankie and mine beautiful wedding party that we had with the horse drawn carriage and the summer hat. here, frankie and i are getting married,

and it was a civil wedding in the townhouse of bemmel. when we came back home to israel, we had a wonderful garden party reception. my mother came and my sister came and my father and my brother and my sister, the religious members of my family did not come. - after a year, i must say i was thankful she divorced him, and there were no children involved. how i would've reacted to, had there been children, and she stayed, i don't know. i don't know. that was the end of that pasuk (verse). - that was marriage number one, which didn't last for long. quite soon after that, i was in a relationship at the, the result of that new relationship was a pregnancy. the pregnancy lasted and the relationship didn't. after eden was born, it was a struggle to keep on working

because before he was born, i had been riding seven or eight horses a day and teaching five, six hours a day and competing five, six horses every weekend, and when you become a single mother, all of that changes. i was exhausted physically and money was short and i was looking for a better place to be in my life, and my brother asked me if i wanted to be introduced to a member of his orthodox community. my brother was the culmination or the epitome of all things successful in this country. he was an excellent, straight a valedictorian in high school. in the army, he was an outstanding officer. then he went straight into medical school for one year, and at the end of his first year at medical school, he went for his big trip abroad. - came back, came to my office wearing beads. so i said, what are you doing with beads?

he says, i'm going back to india. something about hare krishna, i don't remember what it was. hare krishna, hare krishna. (tambourines jingling) (krishnas singing) - and then slowly but surely, he said, okay, but before i become hare krishna, i want to go check out what judsm has to give me, and slowly but surely, he started becoming more and more religious. - and then there's a process of radicalization. it usually starts with posing questions, which is, are you happy with your life? are you looking for more in life? why are we alive? and then they come up with all the answers and many people, and not only in judaism, in islam, in christianity, and in many different religions, find the answers to their questions there. - so roger started coming home in jeans and with the kippah, and then the jeans became black pants and the kippah

became a black kippah, and then the tzitziyot and the white shirt, and our younger sister dina was in the army with roger's wife and dina's boyfriend from san diego, from nursery school, was in the university here in jerusalem on an overseas program, and roger just said, instead of you, ross, going to the university, come to the yeshiva. - when i first started learning in yeshiva, it was very attractive because i felt that i was seeing something that i'd never really seen before. i'd lost out on a few generations of having that relationship with our creator and the daily observance. - my dad's a nuclear engineer and he wasn't happy, and roger persuaded him that instead of going to work,

he should come with him to jerusalem and start hearing lectures about judaism, and he, my dad started going to jerusalem. (man chanting in hebrew) (intense music) - i just felt i had to do it, and i have to live thlife of a jew. - it was very difficult for my mother. we didn't, we weren't brought up in a religious house. we were reform in san diego. - or why he needs the strictures of bratslav hassidut? i can't understand this. it tells you when to go to the bathroom, it tells you when to eat, it tells you when to say this, when to not say that. i don't understand that. - beg orthodox really means a full time observance,

lots of laws, lots of, but it's like learning the rules to a great game. - they tried to get me into it, but was never in it and i'll never be in it. as we all know, all these religious yeshiva boys only take, they don't give. it makes us very angry, very, very upset. they have their reasons for not going in the army. their reasons are not the right reasons. - it was like that there is a knife that is cutting in through the family splitting and splitting the members into two different worlds. one part is going to the ultra orthodox side, which is so to speak a dark side, disconnected from the bright side of the seculars. (lively music) the ultra orthodox see us as people that have no morality

or ideology or philosophy or not, many of them think we're not jewish. it's like going into a different country, a different place, a different continent. so when you see that happening in a family from the father to the last child, maybe generations later, that's a, it's not a simple thing to deal with. - this is my wedding dress for the second marriage, for the religious marriage. i joined into the religious way of life and community, but it was about 15 years or so of being under tremendous pressure from the religious members of my family, and i was craving for a quiet, normal, more spiritual family life, and my religious brother offered to introduce me to a man who was looking for a wife,

and for some reason i agreed to meet him, and one thing led to another and we got married. i must say in all honesty, that that wedding night was one of the happiest moments of my life. i was very much in love and i felt that i was entering this hall of spirituality and beauty and purity. two weeks later, it started falling apart. i never fit in. i never, to the religious families there, especially the religious women. maybe it was because my face was sunburnt from all the years, and maybe because of an athletic way of moving, or maybe the skirt just wasn't the right orthodox skirt. i don't know, or the stockings were wrong, full length stockings. so these are thick ones for the winter. some are a little bit more sheer, but i never got it right.

i kept on riding. i had said to my future husband that the one thing i will not stop doing is riding. i would leave the house with my riding clothes and then the religious clothes on top, peeling off the layers as i'm driving to tel aviv and then riding, and then on the way back, getting dressed again and getting out of the car in the religious neighborhood, fully dressed again. within a month into the marriage, i started hearing him say that things are a little bit down financially, and i'll have to go back to work as riding instructor. this came as a shock to me because before the marriage, i was assured that i would never have to work again. i made a few friends and one of them, she told me that the women that are belittling me and gossiping about me behind my back, they're actually jealous of you, and i couldn't believe that.

i said, what do you mean? and she said, believe me, most of us would love to be in your place, having been outside in the outside world. we have kid after kid after kid. we work outside the home. we have to fit into this very strict, orthodox community, which we do, and most of us don't want to be anywhere else, and she was one of the few totally honest women that i met and realized then the community is rife with everything that they ridicule, which is family violence, child abuse, hypocrisy, racism, racism par excellence, and it was just a terrible, terrible, terrible, traumatic shock for me. i understood that this is not the life that i wanted and that we had to get divorced, and i definitely did not want to raise my kids in this community. i got pregnant immediately as soon as we got married.

i left israel when i was six months pregnant. i flew to the states to my brother. it was a trans-atlantic divorce. if i hadn't gotten the divorce before the baby was born, then the baby could have been used as ammunition in order to not give me a divorce, and according to jewish law, as long as the baby is not born, he's not yet an entity on his own. i prevailed, and then i found myself to be a single mother of two young boys. in 1999, i was invited to be the nouncer at a show jumping competition, (nancy speaking hebrew) and i was already a judge and so on by then, but at that show, i was an announcer, and she came running up to me and she said i have to welcome the delegation of the palestine equestrian federation,

and i come from a very right wing family, and we have had nothing to do with arabs. we were pretty much mainstream israelis in as much as all arabs are murderers, all arabs are terrorists. this was mainstream. there was nothing unusual about this. you didn't have to be very right wing, but we were a right wing family. she said, you have to. you're the only one whose english is good enough who can speak politely, even though you might not believe what you're saying. so i looked to the right and i saw three men. they didn't have horns and they didn't have smoke coming out of their nostrils or anything and i said, okay. so i extended a very warm welcome. at that time, i was working at a stables a little bit north of tel aviv, and with over the next few weeks, the tall, dark, handsome one started showing up at the stables and he convinced me to maybe, maybe start working part-time in jericho.

behind that last ridge of hills, the road leads down to jericho, the dead sea, and the jordan valley. as a result of the oslo accords it was an era of peace. there had been built a beautiful five-star hotel, and the famous jericho casino had been built there. i think five or six thousand israelis were down in jericho every day, gambling their money away. at the time i was living in jerusalem and traveling on buses to tel aviv. i was hoping to find a place that was easier logistically, and of course there was the developing relationship with my co-director at the club, and i thought i would give it a try, and he took me to meet dr. sami mussalam, who was the head of yasir arafat's office in jericho. when arafat had come back with his men in 1994, he had set up presidential offices in each of the main cities, which was jericho, gaza, i think ramallah as well.

hello, dr. sami. can i hug you? - yeah. so dr. sami was the, the big boss. he was the head of the whole thing in jericho, but he was the boss of everything, of the whole city. dr. sami always called me the boss, but he's the boss. from day one, there was so much work to be done because they had so much to learn about basic horse care, training methods, horse welfare, stable management, but they were, they wanted to learn so much, and i just felt that i got there, and just take everything i know. it's yours. (upbeat music)

fine, thank you. can i help you with? - sure. - in our mentality, if somebody, he knows something to teach, he doesn't like to give it to somebody else and he wants to keep it for himself, to not to let any trainer around the country. for nancy, she gave me everything. yeah, you know, without hiding anything from me now, thank god, this is thanks, after god, nancy, i'm the best rider and trainer in palestine. you know, i follow her. (laughing) - okay, so tell us, show us. how long have you been here, eight months? - yeah, it's already eight months. - and what do we see around? - this is ramallah. - ramallah, okay. atarot, beit hanina - french hill, you can see it from big, big building.