Russian Aliyah

From Uzbekistan to North America

By Howard Flower

The first mandate for aliyah work at the ICEJ has been with the Jews of the Former Soviet Union. Since 1989 we have been helping in many areas. Recently we decided to expand our work and reach out to Russian speaking Jews in Germany, the USA and Canada. While more than a million FSU Jews were moving to Israel another 800,000 were moving to other areas. In 2003 we began a program to help in the USA, in 2004 we started our program in Canada and in 2005 we began to work in Germany. We have continued to work in the Former Soviet Union in Russia, Belarus, the Baltic countries and Uzbekistan. Please see the maps on the right side of this page.

Today we are continuing our fishing work through the mass media, television, radio, and direct mail. And recently we have begun fishing through the Internet: “Web Fishing” as we call it. Fishing is a term found in Jer. 16: 16

The major world wide economic downturn will open the way for many Jewish people to make aliyah. We saw this in Russia when the Russian banks collapsed in 1998. A again we saw the aliyah increase among the FSU Jews living in America after the tragedy of 9/11 and the recession in 2001.

We continue our work of providing Aliyah charter flights. The next will be in the Spring of 2009 from Finland, carrying FSU Jewish Olim. We are working together with other Finnish Christian organizations to make these flights possible. We also partner with many other established Aliyah groups such as Ministry to Israel who is one of our most important partners.

We are very thankful for our network of worldwide support and encourage you to continue to work with us to get ready to help this new and fresh wave of aliyah that will be coming soon. Just as we got ready ahead of time to help with the more than one million FSU who came home following to collapse of the Soviet Union we are now making plans for the next wave from the West.
 

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