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Israel's Eras Of Mass Immigration Are Ending

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The Associated Press

Published: September 7, 2008

TEL AVIV, Israel - Melissa Schwab is no Zionist zealot. She's not an Orthodox Jew seeking to be nearer to God. She didn't flee anti-Semitism.

So why move nearly 9,000 miles from her home in Hawaii and settle in life-on-the-edge Israel? Because, she says, she likes a lifestyle that is "secular and normal" while offering something "a bit more meaningful."

The 26-year-old American student's decision to make "aliyah" - the Hebrew term for "going up" - makes her part of the Jewish state's vast immigration enterprise, the bedrock of its very existence. But the influx that brought together more than 3 million Jews from more than 100 countries following Israel's creation in 1948 has dwindled to a trickle.

The last great immigration wave - Ethiopian Christians of Jewish ancestry who convert back to Judaism for resettlement in Israel - has just ended, and with it an iconic chapter in Israeli history.

The persecuted and the poor of world Jewry are for the most part already here. So most future immigrants will be people like Schwab, making a private, individual choice.

Israel's appeal to the Jewish Diaspora used to be as a small nation fighting for its survival, or as a socialist alternative to the capitalist rat race. There were kibbutzim to farm and deserts to make bloom.

But today the Jewish state is in many ways a normal industrialized democracy. Its immigrants today are as likely to be job-hunting non-Jews from Africa and Asia, many of them here illegally, as Zionists in search of spiritual fulfillment.

Living In Both Worlds Easier
Diaspora Jews also are less likely to leave everything behind for Israel. It's much easier today to be a dual national, living part-time in both worlds. Meanwhile, Israelis also have become frequent fliers. The tech-savvy nouveaux-riches of Tel Aviv joke that a visit to New York is more common than a 40-mile pilgrimage to Jerusalem.

Schwab arrived a year ago from Maui, where she practiced Judaism in an informal "Aloha-style kind of way." She is fluent in Hebrew and studies at an Israeli university. Her boyfriend is a "Sabra" - a native-born Israeli. She lives in Tel Aviv, which next year celebrates its centennial as the world's first purpose-built Jewish city.

She's part of an old ideal, "the ingathering of the exiles" - the raison d'etre of the Zionist movement from its beginnings more than a century ago.

Even before Israel became a state, the Jewish population grew to 600,000 in five great waves of immigration as European Jews beset by pogroms and then the Holocaust realized an age-old Jewish dream of returning to Zion after 2,000 years in exile.

More than 3 million more have followed, and Israel's Jewish population now stands at 5.5 million, plus 1.4 million Arab citizens. Of the world's population of just over 13 million Jews, Israel's is the biggest portion, having surpassed America's in 2006.

The 1950s, according to the Jewish Agency, which handles immigration, saw the arrival of 765,000 Jews from North Africa and the Middle East, driven out by the Arab backlash that followed Israel's creation. Next came tens of thousands from the European communist bloc.

Starting in the early 1980s, Israel clandestinely airlifted 80,000 members of Ethiopia's ancient Jewish community, nearly 15,000 of them in just two days in 1991.

No Immediate Need

Today, with no immediate threat to world Jewry, and with the most endangered communities already in Israel, such drama is a thing of the past.

Jews in America and other prosperous Western countries have no pressing motivation to leave everything for Israel, a country founded to provide a haven for Jews but which has become one of the most dangerous places for a Jew to live, because of war and terrorism.

Indeed, while the U.S. Jewish community is one of Israel's most important backers, only 120,000 American Jews have immigrated here.

"I am going to destroy a myth here," said Ori Konforti, the Ethiopia envoy for the quasi-governmental Jewish Agency. "Waves of immigration have never been because of the pulling power of Israel but rather because of the pushing power of where those people came from."

Still, Natan Sharansky, the Soviet Jewish dissident who spent more than a decade in prison, immigrated to Israel and become a Cabinet minister, said people like Schwab are proof that Israel's ideology is still alive and well.

"These people decided that Israel is a place that they want to live their life," he said. "That is a victory of Zionism."

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