As a second-grader living in Jerusalem for a year with his parents, Bryan Finkelstein found himself having to take a taxi home from school alone, without the friends he usually traveled with. He couldn’t say his address in Hebrew, but he knew how to say “yemin” (right) and “smol” (left), and with those two words he directed the driver all the way home.

It is a memory that he’s finding particularly reassuring right now. “I know that if I could do that then, I can do it now,” he said, speaking just two days before leaving on aliya on Jan. 25.

Finkelstein, now 25, decided last year that this was the time to settle in Israel. “I’ve known I wanted to live there since I was eight years old,” he said. “With my 25th birthday coming up [last Dec. 19], I felt this was the next step I’d like to take in my life.”

He left a home in Maplewood and work as a music producer and performer. What he will be doing in Israel is still undecided; he has an apartment lined up in Jerusalem and some promising options career-wise. “I’m hoping to work with kids, using my music,” he said.

Faced with the heartaches such a transition entails, he has one special reassurance: He said he knows he will get to see his parents, Allan and Bonnie Finkelstein, pretty often. Allan Finkelstein is president of the Jewish Community Centers Association of North America and makes the trip regularly. It was while he was director of the JCC in Columbus, Ohio, that he went on sabbatical to Israel and Bryan got his first taste of Israeli life.

“My parents are delighted and elated that I’m doing this,” Bryan said. “They know that it’s what I’ve been wanting to do since I was a young boy.”

In addition to family trips, he went to Israel in ninth grade with a program run by what became the United Jewish Communities of MetroWest NJ and also on a Young Judaea trip. “When you tell non-Jewish friends, they think you’re going to a foreign country. But it’s not like that,” he said. “Apart from being Jewish and having a special feeling for the country, from going there so often I know the lay of the land, and I have family and friends there. It’s far away, but it’s not off the globe.”

One face he will miss is his beloved cat Burgundy. “I love her very, very much, and I thought about taking her with me,” he confessed, “but I decided it would be too much of a burden for me and too much pressure on her. My friends have been telling me to forget Burgundy, that I’ll find a wife in Israel.”

Asked what he’s most anxious about dealing with there, Finkelstein said it was the different monetary system. As for the language, he is determined to master it soon. “If I put half as much effort into learning Hebrew as I did into college and my music, it’ll work out fine. Things are as challenging as you want them to be, and I know I can do this.”

Michael Landsberg, executive director of the Israel Aliyah Center, who guided Finkelstein through his aliya arrangements, said while most New Jerseyans making aliya are married, between 40 and 50 single people went last year, out of a total of around 200.

“Someone like Bryan has contacts of his own, but we give all the help we can. When people call us, we get back to them the same day, and they can call me at any hour.” He said most of the single people tend to be “between one step and another step, like between finishing one degree and starting another, or between apartments or relationships. That’s why the quality and the speediness are so important for them. When they want to go, they want to go.”