How difficult it is to keep a land usurped from others. Israel does not need a nuke for iit to get obliterated from pages of history. It only needs things like weak economy…
MICHELE CHABIN
Bulletin Correspondent
JERUSALEM – As the Israeli government rolled out the red carpet for North American Jews moving to the Holy Land this summer, a quiet reverse exodus was taking place.
Longtime English-speaking immigrants slipped out of the country, victims of Israel’s deepening recession and steep national budget cuts.
In fact, a new report suggests that one-quarter of the North Americans who have immigrated to Israel since 1989 have since left the country.
The findings, compiled by the Israeli daily Ha’aretz, estimate that more than 25 percent of Canadians and 22.5 percent of Americans have left Israel, based on Interior Ministry statistics.
The violent end of the cease-fire has accentuated a sense of instability in Israel for many olim, as recent bombings have included U.S. immigrants.
One of the best barometers of the growing exodus is Janglo, an online bulletin board where English-speaking Jerusalemites buy and sell goods and services (a similar list exists in Tel Aviv). Since May, almost every mailing has included a large-scale moving sale, listing everything from small appliances to the family car.
Another barometer: the downward enrollment for the fall at English-language nursery schools. Preschool teachers say many parents are opting to make yerida, the somewhat derogatory Hebrew term for emigration from Israel, before their children enter kindergarten.
Charles Liebman, a scholar of American Jewry at Bar-Ilan University, suggested that many Americans and Canadians – who generally make aliyah for ideological rather than practical reasons – are naive about Israel’s economic problems and return to their home countries for a higher quality of life.
“We know that people are leaving,” Murray Safran, co-chairman of the Association of Americans and Canadians in Israel/Jerusalem, told The Jewish Week during a recent aliyah fair for 300 North Americans who arrived this summer. “My own son left a month ago because he couldn’t get a decent job in Israel.”
Nachliel Dison, the AACI’s national executive director, said that “we do know from anecdotal evidence that the economic situation is forcing out good people.”
While Dison was “overjoyed at the prospect of so many new olim coming from North America” – more than 1,000 had been expected this summer – he was also “deeply disturbed” that both the Ministry of Absorption and the Jewish Agency were likely to withhold tens of thousands of dollars promised to the AACI and other immigrant groups because of national budget cuts.
He called it “ironic” that the government recently announced its plans to allocate $10 million next year to an educational program designed to encourage diaspora Jews to make aliyah “at a time when it is slashing its services to the immigrants already here.”
Unless the organization’s existing support services are beefed up, Dison said, many North American immigrants “will find it difficult if not impossible to stay.”
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