The newly-appointed far-right Minister Ofir Sofer laments the number of immigrants arriving from Russia and Ukraine to Israel who are not considered Jewish according to an Orthodox interpretation
Complaining that the majority of new arrivals from Russia and Ukraine are not Jewish according to halakha, or Jewish religious law, newly-appointed Aliyah and Integration Minister Ofir Sofer declared on Sunday that Israel must take steps to limit non-Jewish immigration.
During an interview with national broadcaster Kan, Sofer asserted that the Law of Return needed to be amended, although he preferred “to find a way without legislation,” because some 40,000 out of 55,000 new immigrants from Russia and Ukraine are not halakhically Jewish.
“The gap needs to be reduced,” he stated.
According to the Jewish Agency, 37,364 new immigrants arrived in Israel from Russia – along with 14,680 from Ukraine – in 2022. Immigration from both countries has risen precipitously in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine earlier this year.
Concerned that too many immigrants in recent years are not considered Jewish according to halakha, the religious parties allied with Prime Minister Netanyahu have demanded that the law be changed so that only individuals with at least one Jewish parent would be eligible for aliyah.
As such, they have called for the cancelation of the law’s “grandchild clause,” which governs eligibility for aliyah and Israeli citizenship. Under the current Law of Return, an individual with at least one Jewish grandparent is eligible to immigrate to Israel and receive automatic citizenship.
Last month, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich declared in a radio interview that the current immigration policy was “one of the biggest threats to Israeli demography, to the country’s Jewish identity and assimilation.”
“This is a social and Jewish time bomb that must be dealt with. We insist on it and will continue to insist on it,” Smotrich told ultra-Orthodox radio station Kol Barama.
His comments seemed to be a response to then Prime Minister-designate Benjamin Netanyahu’s efforts to downplay the possibility of changing the law.
Speaking with NBC’s Chuck Todd, Netanyahu stated that while the issue would lead to what he called “a big debate,“ he has “pretty firm views” and “I doubt we’ll have any changes.”
However, despite his comments, coalition agreements signed by Netanyahu’s Likud Party contain clauses requiring the new government to draft legislative amendments to the Law of Return.
If the religious parties set to be in Israel’s next governing coalition have their way, nearly 3 million people with Jewish roots – the overwhelming majority of them from the United States – could lose their right to immigrate to Israel, according to Prof. Emeritus Sergio DellaPergola, Israel’s leading demographer.
In 2019, Israel announced that Jewish immigrants to Israel were outnumbered by non-Jewish immigrants for the first time, releasing figures from the Central Bureau of Statistics showing that 17,700 of the 32,600 migrants who moved to Israel in 2018 came under the Law of Return but were listed as “having no religion.”
Such immigrants, hailing largely from the former Soviet Union and Baltic states, count Jewish ancestry but are ineligible to marry as Jews, for example, under the state-controlled rabbinic court system.
According to CBS statistics published by the Ynet news site this November, 72 percent of immigrants to Israel from the former Soviet Union in 2020 were not Jewish.
All told, there are already more than 400,000 people, mostly from the former Soviet Union, living in Israel who are not considered Jewish by the Chief Rabbinate. For the past several years, immigration from the former Soviet Union has again been on the rise, edging out France and other Western European nations as the source for the largest number of new immigrants.
Sofer is not the only figure in the new government with influence over immigration policy who has spoken out against non-halakhic Jewish aliyah.
Avi Maoz, the head of the far-right Noam Party, was recently appointed the head of the Eastern European aliyah agency, Nativ. He has spoken about changing the law so that those whose only claim to being Jewish from a single grandparent can immigrate to Israel exclusively in the framework of family reunification. In other words, only if the immigrant’s Jewish grandfather lives in Israel.
Judy Maltz and JTA contributed to this report.
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