As a Druze Israeli in Haifa, Rafat Fadel was certain that his relationship with Nikola Clark, a Jewish American, would not last.
“I will never marry you, and I will never have kids with you,” Rafat recalled telling Nikola early on. “It’s up to you if you want to waste your time.”
Today, more than 30 years, a major move, a wedding, two kids and a bar mitzvah later, Rafat and Nikola sat down with J. in their Berkeley home to reflect on their unlikely love story and the future they want for their family.
The couple first met in 1993 at a hospital where Rafat, who was then serving in the Israel Defense Forces’ Golani Brigade, was recovering from knee injury. Nikola, an international student at Haifa University, had come to the hospital to visit an injured friend who served with Rafat.
She wasted little time in asking her friend for Rafat’s number. But apart from the fact that he spoke very broken English at the time and Nikola spoke only basic Hebrew, there was another major obstacle.
“You know, he’s Druze,” the friend told her.
“That doesn’t matter to me,” Nikola said. “Give him my number.”
Rafat, 52, was born and raised in Maghar, a village about 30 miles east of Haifa. A majority of its population is Druze, an Arabic-speaking ethno-religious group that lives in northern Israel, Syria and Lebanon. Within Israel, the Druze population has grown significantly, from 14,000 in 1949 to 150,000 in 2022, according to the most recent census data from Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics.
Ever since they fought alongside Jewish forces during Israel’s 1948 War of Independence, the Druze have built a reputation of loyalty to the Jewish state. As the only Arab minority group subject to Israel’s military draft, the Druze are lauded for serving in senior positions in the IDF. However, they are still outspoken in their critiques of the Israeli government, such as the adoption of the controversial nation-state law in 2018, which essentially relegated the Druze and other minorities to second-class citizenship.
The Druze rarely wed outside of their faith. A 2015 Pew Research Center survey in Israel found that only 1% of Druze, Muslims or Christians do so.
Druze men occasionally date non-Druze women, but Nikola said friends warned her those relationships rarely lasted. Of the Druze respondents to the Pew survey, over 80% said they would be uncomfortable with the idea of their child marrying a non-Druze.
Rafat and Nikola became a rare exception to that norm. Yet he knew his family would not accept him marrying outside of the community. For the first 18 years, Nikola was an “open secret” in Rafat’s family. They suspected the couple was together, but only Rafat’s younger brother knew the extent of the relationship.
“They kind of knew I was with her. But nobody wanted to ask me,” he said. So he chose not to talk about it, either. “I went through a lot of guilt… It was a lot of pressure.”
For Nikola, 54, the challenges came from the lack of open communication on her husband’s side of the family, the cultural differences and Rafat’s guilt.
“Under normal circumstances, you meet each other’s families, and that didn’t happen. It was what it was,” Nikola said. “But as the years went on, it was very hard. It has not been an easy relationship for either one of us.”
I feel like in America, you really have to have a solid ground of who you are, where you come from Nikola Clark
Her family at home in Berkeley accepted the relationship but had practical concerns for the future. “You’ve got to come back,” her parents told her. “He’s not going to marry you. What are you doing?”
So she did just that. After four years of living together in Haifa, the couple broke up and Nikola returned to Berkeley in 1997. “We didn’t know if we’d ever see each other again,” Nikola said.
Their separation did not last long. After exchanging letters for a few months, Rafat joined her. They wed in August 1999 at Oakland City Hall.
He enrolled at Cal and earned a bachelor’s degree in landscape architecture in 2003. After 13 years in the industry, he started his own landscape architecture design company. Meanwhile, Nikola worked a variety of jobs, from aesthetician to project manager to bookkeeper before transitioning to full-time parenting when their second child, Nilah, was born in 2015.
Up until 2011, Rafat did not open up to his family about his marriage. That was the year their first child, Rocco, was born, and he planned finally to share the news with his mother (his father died in 2003). Instead it slipped out when Rafat’s excited brother told her first.
“My mom basically cried for two weeks. She said, ‘He’s a traitor.’ She was upset.” But knowing there was a new grandchild, before long “she started asking for photos,” Rafat said. “I did feel like a mountain was lifted off my shoulders once everybody knew.” Today, he said, “Nikola is my mom’s favorite daughter-in-law.”
Rafat and Nikola both consider themselves secular, and neither one is religiously observant. However, they acknowledge the importance of passing down the values and traditions of their respective cultures to their children.
“I feel like in America, you really have to have a solid ground of who you are, where you come from,” Nikola said.
Nikola was raised by a British non-Jewish father and a Hungarian Jewish mother who was a Holocaust survivor; they moved together to the United States in the early 1960s. Though her family was not observant and did not belong to a synagogue, her grandmother hosted regular Shabbat dinners, a tradition Nikola remembers fondly.
“She did what she could to keep the tradition going. We grew up very much with Jewish values,” she said. “But then she died. … Suddenly that [tradition] was gone. It was just like there were no more Friday night dinners. Nobody was picking up the slack, nobody.”
Nikola decided to reinstitute Shabbat dinners in her own home once her children began attending preschool at the JCC East Bay in Berkeley. A couple of years ago, Nilah began to take a more active role in embracing the weekly tradition.
“She really gets into it. She calls herself the Shabbat Sheriff,” Nikola said of her daughter, now 9.
Nilah’s involvement in Jewish life provided her older brother with an opportunity to connect as well. Through the Gan Israel day camp run by Chabad Berkeley, Rocco met camp director and Emeryville Chabad Rabbi Mendy Blank, who offered to help the family celebrate Rocco’s bar mitzvah after finding out his 13th birthday was coming up.
The Chabad-Lubavitch movement opposes intermarriage and does not officiate at interfaith weddings. However, Blank explained that he is happy to help any Jewish child become more connected to their faith.
During the preparation, Rocco had a chance to pick a Hebrew name. He chose Rafael, an homage to Rafi, the childhood nickname of his father and one that stuck during his army service.
Blank noticed that Rafat’s exposure to Jewish culture growing up in Israel made him more open-minded and thoughtful than most. “As we were preparing for the bar mitzvah, he had so many questions, and he was really interested, really supportive of his son,” the rabbi said.
The family, including Rocco’s maternal grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins, celebrated the bar mitzvah arranged by Chabad Berkeley in late September.
“The whole thing was just so entertaining,” Nikola said. “They made it fun, and they made it so casual. There was no right or wrong way to any of it. We were just celebrating it. … It was just perfect for us, and I really respected that.”
The family of four has returned to Israel twice to visit Rafat’s family. Though the current war has made it difficult to plan their next visit, Nikola and Rafat hope to return soon, possibly for a wedding in June, knowing the importance of maintaining their children’s connection with extended family. Nilah and Rocco, Nikola said, are lucky to have “two very rich cultures.”
Rafat wants to make sure his children are always aware of their family’s mixed heritage.
“You cannot deny your kids their history,” he said. “You cannot deny your kids who they are.”