-1- Reconstruction of the Soviet Diaspora: Analysis of the Jewish Immigration from the Former Ussr in Israel

While most European countries have only timidly opened their doors to the population of Eastern Europe -clearly preferring those who are highly qualified-, Israel has welcomed hundreds of thousands of former Soviet citizens within a few years. One reason for this tendency is that the only populations to leave Eastern Europe en masse were those which had a historical ‘homeland’ to which they could emigrate. That was the case for ethnic German, Jewish and Greek minorities who, with the collapse of the Soviet bloc, were released from their ‘house arrest’. Even a casual glance at the post-1989 patterns of migration will confirm the passage of these ethnic minorities through the opening created by the collapse of the Iron Curtain. Of the 450,000 people who left the Soviet Union in 1990, 45 per cent moved to Israel, 42 per cent moved to Germany, 6 per cent went to the United States and 5 per cent went to Greece (Vichnevski and Zayontchkovskaia 1992, 44). Even if the percentage of Jews migrating has globally been on the decline, no less than 850,000 migrants from the former USSR have entered Israel between 1990 and 2000, around 15 per cent of Israel’s current population. These hundreds of thousands of immigrants asked the state of Israel for assistance and in turn brought an incredible wealth of growth and knowledge, but have also raised the question of Israeli identity in the course of these last eight years. The purpose of this paper is therefore to explore the process of FSU Jews’ integration in Israel and to establish socio-political points of reference on this migratory movement towards a country in full identity introspection.