In the years leading up to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 and for just over a decade thereafter, a particularly large number of Jews emigrated from the Soviet Union and the post-Soviet countries. The majority of these emigrants made Aliyah to Israel, while a sizable number immigrated to various countries in the Western world. This wave of Jewish migration followed the 1970s Soviet aliyah, which began after the Soviet government gave special permission to the country's Jewish refuseniks to emigrate.
Between 1989 and 2006, about 1.6 million Soviet Jews and their relatives left the country. About 979,000, or 61%, were received by Israel under the Law of Return, which allows Jews and their non-Jewish spouses to relocate to Israel and acquire Israeli citizenship. Another 325,000 and 219,000 immigrated to the United States and Germany, respectively.
Many of the Ashkenazi Jews who lived in all parts of the former Soviet Union were highly secular, and notable Jewish customs went unpracticed, such as a Brit milah (circumcision ceremony). Upon arriving to Israel, tens of thousands of teenage boys and men underwent circumcision. Among these Jews was also a significant amount of intermarriage; according to the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, 26% of and from the Soviet Union did not have their Jewishness recognized by the halakhic definition, but were still eligible for Israeli citizenship due to patrilineal Jewish descent or through marriage to a Jew.Sheleg, Yair: Improperly Jews. Israel Democracy Institute (P. 10)
While most of the immigration wave was made up of Ashkenazi Jews, a notable number of Mizrahi Jews also made aliyah from the Soviet Union's Asian territories during this time, such as the Mountain Jews, the Georgian Jews, and the Bukharian Jews, among others. These Jewish communities were much more traditional and substantially less affected by Soviet secularism, maintaining a strong Jewish identity. Indeed, the Haskalah movement, various socialist movements, and the desire for communism that appeared among Ashkenazi communities never made its way to the non-Ashkenazi communities. Furthermore, they maintained a more patriarchal family structure, with lower rates of women's employment and higher numbers of children. By contrast to the highly educated and assimilated Ashkenazim, these Mizrahi Jews more often than not made their living in commerce, crafts, and business.
The overwhelming majority of the Ashkenazi immigrants have been credited with boosting Israel's economy, helping grow the country's famous high-tech industry in particular.
History
Following the Six-Day War in 1967, many Soviet Jews began applying for exit visas and demonstrating for their right to leave. This was accompanied by a worldwide campaign calling on the Soviet government to allow Jews to emigrate. The Jewish immigration to Israel was given a special exemption in 1971, leading to the 1970s Soviet Union aliyah.
Individual citizens of the Soviet Union who wanted to emigrate had to obtain exit visas. Many who sought exit visas were denied. Those who tried to escape the USSR, and did not succeed, called refuseniks, were often branded traitors, fired from their jobs, and subject to public harassment. Those who received exit visas lost their Soviet citizenship and had to pay an exit tax. Under the Communist regime, real estate assets such as apartments usually belonged to the state, and emigrants had to cede those assets in the majority of cases. After the fall of the Soviet Union and the establishment of capitalism in Russia and other former Soviet republics, those laws were canceled. On July 1, 1991, a change in Soviet law came into effect under which emigrants would no longer have to forfeit their Soviet citizenship. From then, emigrants who left the Soviet Union and its successor states after the fall of the Soviet Union were able to keep their assets, and those from successor states which allowed dual citizenship were able to retain their citizenship.
In response to growing international pressure, the Soviets began allowing Jews to emigrate in limited numbers annually starting in 1968, officially for "family reunification". Initially, most went to Israel, but after 1976, the majority began immigrating to the United States, which had a policy of treating Soviet Jews as refugees under the Jackson-Vanik amendment. In total, some 291,000 Soviet Jews were granted exit visas between 1970 and 1988, of whom 165,000 immigrated to Israel and 126,000 to the United States.
In 1989, Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev decided to lift restrictions on emigration. That same year, 71,000 Soviet Jews emigrated, of whom only 12,117 immigrated to Israel. In Vienna, a major transit point for immigration to Israel, some 83% chose to go to the United States. In October 1989, the US government stopped treating Soviet Jews as refugees, as another country, Israel, was willing to accept them unconditionally. However, granting refugee status to Soviet Jews persisted in some form, as the Lautenberg Amendment to the Foreign Operations Appropriations Act (Section 599D) required the executive branch to establish refugee processing categories for Jews, Evangelical Christians, Ukrainian Catholics, and Ukrainian Orthodox Church members and give members of these categories an enhanced opportunity to qualify for refugee status. In 1990, 185,227 Soviet immigrants arrived in Israel (out of about 228,400 Jews who left the Soviet Union that year). Approximately 148,000 more Soviet immigrants arrived in Israel in 1991. Immigration to Israel dropped off significantly from then on but remained steady between 1992 and 1995. In 1992, 65,093 Soviet immigrants arrived in Israel, followed by 66,145 in 1993, 68,079 in 1994, and 64,848 in 1995. From then on, Soviet immigration dipped below 60,000 per year for the next few years, though a spike occurred in 1999 when 66,848 immigrants arrived in Israel. This decline continued into the 2000s. In 2000 50,817 immigrants arrived followed by 33,601 in 2001, and after that immigration to Israel from the former Soviet Union declined to less than 20,000 per year.
As the wave of emigration began, Soviet Jews who wanted to emigrate left the Soviet Union for various European countries and began gathering at transit points, from which they were flown to Israel, and the Israeli government ordered the national airline El Al to put every available plane at the disposal of the immigrants. Some Soviet immigrants also came by sea on chartered ships.
Before the opening of direct flights between Moscow and Tel Aviv, Hungary played a crucial intermediary role in the emigration of Soviet Jews. Between 1989 and 1991, over 160,000 Soviet Jewish refugees transited through Budapest under a joint program operated by Malév Hungarian Airlines and the Jewish Agency. This makeshift air corridor became the main route for aliyah during this transitional period, as Hungary actively aligned its emerging post-Communist identity with humanitarian and pro-Western commitments, despite the risks posed by terrorist threats and internal political pressures.
Direct flights from the Soviet Union to Israel carrying immigrants took place in January and February 1990. The first direct flight, which carried 125 immigrants, departed Moscow on January 1, 1990. On February 22, 1990, the Soviet government suspended the direct flights. Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze had ordered the direct flights stopped following a speech by Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir in the Jerusalem neighborhood and settlement of Neve Yaakov, a predominantly Russian immigrant neighborhood over the Green Line, hinting that Soviet immigrants would be housed in Israeli settlements. Direct flights were resumed in August 1991. In December 1991, the Soviet Union itself collapsed. Eventually, every city in the former Soviet Union with a large Jewish population became a staging point for direct flights.Gilbert, Martin: Israel: A History (2008)
In the aftermath of breakup of the Soviet Union, a series of wars erupted in areas of the former Soviet Union, and Jewish refugees from these war-torn areas were evacuated to Israel with the help of the Jewish Agency. During the War in Abkhazia, all Jews who wished to flee Abkhazia were evacuated and resettled in Israel. Jews from Chechnya fleeing the First Chechen War were evacuated to Israel in a rescue operation conducted by the Israeli government and Jewish Agency lasting several months. During the War of Transnistria in Moldova, Jews fleeing the war area went to cities such as Chișinău and Odessa, from where they were flown to Israel.
Absorption in Israel Geographical dissemination
The abruptness and extensiveness of this immigration wave brought about an immediate severe shortage of housing in Israel, in the Gush Dan area in particular, and a corresponding drastic rise in the prices of residential apartments. As a result, Ariel Sharon, then Israel's Minister for Housing Construction, initiated several programs to encourage the construction of new residential buildings, which partly included the concession of different planning procedures. When those resources were inadequate to the growing immigration wave, and many immigrants remained lacking a roof, within two years about 430 caravan sites were set up across Israel, comprising 27,000 caravans. The largest caravan site was founded in Beersheba, consisting of 2,308 housing units.
After that period, the immigrants dissipated throughout Israel. But this immigration wave exhibited a phenomenon common to previous Israeli immigration waves: the efforts of the state to transfer the immigrants to the periphery primarily affected immigrants of lower socio-economic status, while those from higher socio-economic levels, who had the resources to resist these efforts, moved to residential areas of their own choice instead, mostly in Gush Dan. (Additional cities to which many of the immigrants moved (willingly and unwillingly) were Haifa and the Krayot urban area, Petah Tikva, Ariel and Ashdod.) Thus, the immigration wave had a clear regional and ethnic aspect: while the majority of the immigrants originating from the European areas of the Commonwealth of Independent States moved to the center of Israel, most of the immigrants who moved to the periphery were from the Central Asian republics and the Caucasus.
Absorption characteristics The absorption laws changed with time. The basic government grants given to each immigrant changed rapidly from the late 1980s to the late 1990s. Most of the immigrants initially located on the periphery and later dispersed to the "Russian" neighborhoods. There were cities, mainly in the medium and lower socio-economic levels, in which immigrants constituted over 50% of all the residents.
Many of the immigrants integrated into the Israeli labor market, but the majority remained confined in their own communities. The closed nature of this immigration wave may have been due to its large size, which resulted in neighborhoods of sometimes tens of thousands of people. Also, many immigrants failed to adapt to the receiving society and the society's expectancy that they change to facilitate their social absorption.
Many of the new immigrants found that their former education was not recognized by many Israeli employers, though it was recognized by institutions of higher education. Many had to work in jobs which did not match their expertise, or undergo retraining.