Israel Immigration

The Bush Administration obtained advance support of American Jewish leaders before imposing new rules that had the effect of diverting most Soviet Jewish emigres from the United States to Israel, according to informed sources. Administration officials and Jewish leaders both said that the consultations defused what could have turned into a firestorm of controversy.

Many people don't think of Israel as a multicultural country full of immigrants ? lots of them non-Jews from Asia, Africa and Eastern Europe ? but that reality and its complexities underpin "The Human Resources Manager," the new film from Israeli director Eran Riklis. "There are thousands of foreign workers in Israel, and they come from all around the world, notably Romania, Thailand, Africa," said Riklis, whose previous films, "The Syrian Bride" and "Lemon Tree," dealt with the conflict between Jews and Palestinians.

For three days, the American Jewish visitors heard speeches by Israeli leaders, visited Soviet and Ethiopian Jewish immigrants and were lodged and dined in a style fit for the rich. Now, as another sumptuous meal was about to start, the crunch began. The philanthropists, who had pledged $100,000 to be invited on this trip, made their donations. One businessman promised $325,000. Another upped his pledge from $85,000 to $120,000.

A sacred tenet of the Jewish state is under fire. Alarmed by statistics showing that more and more immigrants to Israel aren't Jewish under the strictest interpretation of Jewish religious law, prominent politicians, commentators and others are urging the government to consider, for the first time, tightening the venerated "Law of Return." That policy automatically grants citizenship to anyone with a Jewish parent, grandparent or spouse. Prime Minister Ehud Barak forcefully rejects the idea.

The war has drastically reduced the pace of SOVIET IMMIGRATION to Israel, with the February rate--between 180 and 370 a day--running at less than half the December figure of 1,000 a day. At that rate, the Israeli government says, 300,000 Soviet immigrants will arrive in 1991-- 100,000 less than earlier projections. Many Arabs fear the influx will displace Palestinians in Israeli-occupied territories. Soviet Immigration (Immigration in thousands) Feb.

Israel's chief immigration agency has sharply lowered its estimates of new Soviet arrivals this year and blamed the expected shortfall on insufficient job opportunities and botched planning by the government. More than 300,000 Jewish immigrants had been expected to arrive in 1991, but the Jewish Agency, the quasi-governmental body that arranges travel for the newcomers, scaled down the expectation to about 200,000.

With the arrival of 500 Soviet Jews--making a total of 1,600 Russian immigrants in one week--Israel's immigration chief urged the government to quickly reevaluate its budget to better aid newcomers. Rabbi Yitzhak Peretz said he is worried that the rapidly increasing number of immigrants will eventually create absorption problems. Israeli officials estimate that 150,000 to 250,000 Soviet Jews could come to Israel over the next three to four years.

Secretary of State James A. Baker III, trying to patch up Washington's troubled relationship with Israel, agreed Friday to move ahead with a long-stalled program to provide $400 million in loan guarantees to finance housing for Soviet Jewish immigrants. Zalman Shoval, Israel's new ambassador to Washington, said Baker told him during a 55-minute meeting that a team from the Agency for International Development will visit Israel soon to work out details for the program.

A bloody conflict in Ethiopia is presenting Israel with a dilemma: whether to continue to supply arms to the battered Marxist government of Mengistu Haile Mariam and keep the flow of black Jewish immigrants open, or cut off the weapons and risk a bottleneck in Addis Ababa, Foreign Ministry officials here say. The decision is complicated further by the sinking fortunes of the Communist government in Ethiopia.

Israel in 1990 received the highest number of immigrants in one year since 1949 and expects new records to be set in 1991, immigration officials said Monday. Approximately 187,000 immigrants, the majority of them Soviet Jews, have arrived in Israel since January, 1990, immigration officials said. Their number is expected to reach 200,000 by Dec. 31, the highest number since 1949--a year after independence--when 239,964 Jews arrived in Israel in a one-year period, officials said.

Immigration by Jews from Russia to Israel rose significantly in the first half of 1999, Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics said Thursday. The bureau said 12,190 Jews from Russia came to Israel in the first six months of the year, an increase of 130% compared with the same period last year. Earlier this year, the quasi-governmental Jewish Agency attributed a rise in newcomers from Russia to the economic crisis there and a rise in anti-Semitism.

An American family that converted to Conservative Judaism has received temporary Israeli visas after being refused entry into the Jewish state in another flare-up in the dispute between Israel's Orthodox establishment and non-Orthodox Judaism. Elezar Yisrael, his wife and six children arrived in Israel on May 12. After first being denied entry, they were given 30-day visas.

In a discovery that gives sudden credence to one of Israel's most persistent conspiracy theories, a California woman has been proved to be the daughter of a Yemenite Jewish immigrant whose baby was taken from her almost half a century ago. Tzila Levine, now of Sacramento, was 1 year old in 1949 when she was taken from her mother, Margalit Umassi, in a chaotic immigrant transit camp and given a short time later to apparently unsuspecting adoptive parents elsewhere in Israel.

Inside a cave-like bar near the old central bus station here, more than a dozen Romanian men drink beer and gaze listlessly at the pornography playing on a flickering television. A few blocks away, up a trash-strewn stairwell, a pristine, whitewashed church awaits the arrival of its Nigerian and Ghanaian faithful for evening prayers.

Jewish settlers said they planned to triple their numbers under Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Settler leaders in the Gaza Strip and Israeli-occupied areas of the West Bank said their plans included creation of settlements, although the focus would be on expanding existing communities. "There must . . . be an addition--I am not sure whether we will finish this in four years--of from 300,000 to 500,000 Jewish residents," settler leader Pinhas Wallerstein said.

Seven American Jews, including a New York rabbi, were cited as security risks and barred from entering the country by officials still reeling from the assassination last month of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. The Interior Ministry said Rabbi Abraham Hecht, 73, of New York had given a religious justification for killing Rabin only months before the killing, although he apologized in a letter to Rabin days before the assassination.

The happiness of Alexander Lerner overflows from his small office in the basement of the Weizmann Institute of Science here and virtually envelops all who pass. The warm and ebullient Lerner quickly ticks off the reasons for his joy. A coronary pump, the result of 20 years' research on an artificial heart, is ready for trial use. He lives in a comfortable flat with his son and daughter-in-law; his daughter is just down the street. He cannot think of any unmet material needs.

Faced with growing Muslim criticism that it is helping to drive Palestinians from their homes in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, the Soviet Union on Monday called for an urgent U.N. Security Council meeting to condemn Israel's policy of settling Soviet Jewish immigrants there. It also took the unusual step of calling on the United States to speed processing of applications from Soviet Jews who want to go to America so that more will have an alternative to Israel.

Russian physicist Igor Fridman moved to Israel four years ago with the dream of evolving a type of explosion technology he had developed back home. Fridman arrived at the start of the Gulf War with his wife and two children, no money and no knowledge of Hebrew. "The beginning was so hard I can't even talk about it," Fridman said.

At a time of great uncertainty in the relationship between the Jewish state and the Jewish people, at least one man passionately believes that the beleaguered Jewish Agency can play a powerful role in reshaping the ties between the two communities. The chief advocate for the bureaucracy that many Israelis have long viewed as little more than a dumping ground for fading politicians is Avraham Burg, the agency's newly elected chairman.