New arrivals to be greeted at airport Tuesday by Minister of Immigrant Absorption Ze’ev Elkin
Some 221 new immigrants from the United States and Canada are set to arrive on Tuesday to start their new lives in Israel.
They will arrive on a special charter flight organized by Nefesh B’Nefesh in cooperation with the Ministry of Immigrant Absorption and the Jewish Agency, according to a statement sent out to the press.
On board are 32 families, including 95 children. They will be greeted at Ben Gurion Airport by Minister of Immigrant Absorption MK Ze’ev Elkin (Likud) and other officials.
According to the statement, some 4,000 immigrants from North America will arrive in Israel this year, half of them over the summer months.
Immigration from France, Russia and Ukraine is also expected to increase this year.
According to the Jewish Agency, around 3,000 French Jews are expected to make aliyah — the Hebrew term for immigration to Israel — this summer, many young families among them.
Israeli officials, including Elkin, have called on French Jews to immigrate to Israel in light of the rise of anti-Semitism in France and a string of horrific terror attack in recent months, including the assault on a kosher deli in January in which four Jewish men were killed.
In 2015, as of June 1 some 5,904 people immigrated to Israel from the former Soviet Union. Only 3,698 people had done so by the same point in 2014, representing a 59.64 percent increase, according to figures from the Immigration Absorption Ministry released in June.
If immigration from the FSU keeps up this pace through the end of the year, Israel could see some 18,000 people arrive, up from the 11,860 in 2014.
Immigration from Russia in the first five months of 2015 was 2,464, up from 1,608 during the same period the year before.
The figures from Ukraine were even more dramatic, especially compared to the years before the fighting. So far this year 2,990 Ukrainians have moved to Israel; just 1,614 did so between January and May 2014, representing an 85.25% jump from the former Soviet republic.
Only 1,982 people total moved from Ukraine to Israel in 2013, before the conflict began. If the immigration rate holds steady through the end of this year, over 10,000 Ukrainians can be expected to make aliyah in 2015.
The Jewish Agency told reporters the marked increase has been linked to both the military conflict directly and to the resulting economic downturn, which sent both countries into dangerous levels of inflation.
As reported by The Times of Israel