Last night I walked out of the house I grew up in for the last time.

My parents, who have been splitting their time between Jerusalem and New York for the past seven years, have sold our house in New York and will now be spending all their time here. I went back to New York for a few days to help them dismantle and to settle all sorts of tangential issues arising from the loss of my U.S. address. And to part from the house and the neighborhood in which my siblings and I grew up.

We moved into that house 40 years ago. I've been in Israel for 27 of those years but it was still home. To be sure, the guys I played touch football with in the park every Friday afternoon and the gang that came over on Shabbos afternoon to play Risk, bull around and eat Stella D'Oro Swiss Fudge cookies have long ago dispersed to the four corners of the earth. Most of my parents' friends have moved on as well -- the lucky ones to the company of their descendants and the less lucky ones to the company of their ancestors.

The neighborhood has changed as well. The larger houses are being bought up by Russians, who immediately surround them with large walls. (It's a good thing state law forbids moats with alligators.) The only frum people moving in are yeshivaleit buying the houses in the area where the goyim used to live. In short, the supply of baalbatim is drying up quickly. The previous rabbi of the big shul, who was a talmid chakham and a scholar, has been succeeded by a sincere teller of Artscroll maaselech.

But still through all these years, I've always known that when I needed to or wanted to, I could go back to my old neighborhood, to my old house, to my old bed. To a place where people still add a -y to my first name. Home.

No more. The American era in my family history began when my parents arrived as refugees, my father in middle of the Shoah and my mother after it, tired and poor and yearning to breathe free. And since my siblings and I all live in Israel now, this era will end in a few weeks when my parents leave America not as refugees but as olim -- komemiyut le'artzeinu. The debt we owe the United States is too profound for words. It is truly a malkhus shel chessed, free and open in a manner unprecedented in the history of the world, and it is characterized by an unparalleled fundamental decency.

My family celebrates this Thanksgiving in Israel without turkey or cranberry sauce but with a great deal of gratitude. Thank you, America, for everything.