71 years of immigration to Israel

71 years of immigration to Israel

  • 5/27/2019
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    228 000 new Israeli citizens have joined Israel in 2017, 28 000 of them through immigration and 185 000 were brand new Israeli babies.
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    Even though Israel is such a young country, having just celebrated its 71st year of independence, its continuous growth of population has resulted in more than 9 million inhabitants in 2019, as was recently published by the Central Bureau of Statistics.
     
    228 000 new Israeli citizens have joined Israel in 2017, 28 000 of them through immigration and 185 000 were brand new Israeli babies.
     
    Since its creation, the State of Israel has always welcomed immigrants from all over the world. This started right after the signature of the Declaration of Independence, when from 1948 to 1951 the newborn country received its largest wave of immigration with hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees, survivors of Nazi Europe, mainly originating from Germany, Austria, Italy, Poland and Romania. Between 1950 and 1960, due to the tensions between Israel and the Arab States, entire Jewish communities immigrated to Israel from Asia, Africa and Yemen.
     
    One of the biggest waves of Jewish immigration came from Ethiopia. This immigration proceeded in two major movements, “Operation Moses”, which rescued approximately 8000 Ethiopians who had to flee to Sudan during a famine in 1984, and “Operation Solomon” in 1991, following government upheaval, when in 36 hours, 14 000 Ethiopians Jews were airlifted to Israel.
     
    Around the 1990’s when the government of Mikhail Gorbachev opened the borders of the USSR, approximately 900 000 Russians Jews arrived in Israel. These immigrants, among them engineers, scientists and IT specialists, partly fueled the tech boom of the 90’s in Israel.
     
    The immigration from France has always been part of Israel’s history, and a new wave has emerged since 2000, largely as a result of growing anti-Semitism and terror attacks targeting Jews. Today, the numbers are still high as -  in 2018, 29 600 French immigrants landed in the country.
     
    The 71-year-old nation has always been a refuge and a safe home for Jewish people from all over the world. The young country been a model of integration where people from different cultural backgrounds lived together as one community. While every wave of immigration presented its challenges, Israel has spared no effort in order to integrate all immigrants so that they could find personal fulfillment in a modern democratic country.