In the 1990s, over 1 million citizens of the former Soviet Union made their way to the Jewish state, changing it and strengthening it dramatically. The current war between Russia and Ukraine, and the increasing repressiveness of Vladimir Putin’s regime, have prompted another wave of immigration. Armin Rosen describes Jerusalem’s efforts to respond to what he calls “Putin’s aliyah.”
Israel, like much of the rest of the world, was not prepared for the consequences of the Ukraine war, which more than doubled the annual number of immigrants to the country and strained the existing absorption infrastructure. . . . “Israel always wants aliyah,” said [the country’s most famous Soviet immigrant, Natan] Sharansky, “but I don’t remember the case where Israel was prepared for a wave of aliyah.”
As [the Ministry of Aliyah and Integration’s director general, Avichai] Kahana put it, “we couldn’t do our job, because we had a new job”—the old job was to help at most 30,000 immigrants build a new life in the Jewish state each year; the new job was to resettle rapidly tens of thousands of people in the midst of the worst European security crisis in generations. Putin also wields the implicit threat of closing the country’s borders, refusing to let Jews emigrate, or targeting Jewish institutions inside the country. The Russian government initiated frivolous legal proceedings against the Jewish Agency last year, a move that effectively shut down the organization’s work in the country.
The blinkered obsession of mainstream American Jewish organizations with their own supposedly special role in Israel’s internal political crises stands in sharp contrast to the community’s engagement with the needs of Russian olim at the height of the Soviet Jewry movement in the 1980s and 1990s.
Read more on Tablet: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/putins-aliyah-is-in-danger-sharansky