YOUNG PROFESSIONALS land in Israel on a Nefesh B’Nefesh charter aliyah flight. (photo credit: SHAHAR AZRAN)
HOWARD EPSTEIN – ISRAEL LETTER – THEIR LOSS IS ISRAEL’S GAIN
Last Sunday, the Israeli Immigration Minister announced that 27,000 new immigrants will have made Israel their home during 2021. This represents an increase of some 23% over the previous year. Yet perhaps the more amazing statistic is the lower figure for 2020, for that was the year of the great lockdown. It is surely remarkable that during the height of the Covid crisis there were 21,000 individuals prepared to give up whatever certainty they had in their lives for another certainty: that aliyah is not an easy option.
But it is an enriching one and one thing is for sure: in Israel, there is no western-style anti-Semitism.
This last observation may explain why immigration from the USA will be up by some 35% in 2021. Given that New York alone has seen racist attacks on Jews increased by 50% in the past year, one may see the trend increasing.
From Argentina, the aliyah figures are truly impressive: a 50% increase over 2020. France will, in 2021, post a 41% increase year on year. And still, they come from Russia. Some 7,000 are expected by the year’s end, with another 3,000 from Ukraine. Clearly, the obstacles to be overcome by olim chadashim are not overwhelmingly daunting for thousands of people.
It is instructive to note that Hungary has been a second-rate European state since it drove out some of its finest brains — for example, Leo Szilard (who patented the nuclear chain reaction), John von Neumann (who was described as “the last representative of the great mathematicians”) and Eugene Wigner (who won a Nobel prize in physics 1963). And Hungary suffered the loss of virtually the whole of its Jewish community to Eichmann, his train timetables, and the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
The Hungarian experience is, however, a mere trifle compared to the way in which Hitler almost turned to dust German scientific prowess. As a direct result of the Nazis’ race laws, and the storm that they foresaw would engulf them, at least 32 of the greatest scientists of the twentieth century left Germany. Of the 32, all but three were Jewish; 13 had won, or went on to win, Nobel Prizes; and 19 became part of the Manhattan Project, which created the atomic bomb for the Americans.
A 2014 report, entitled German Jewish Émigrés and US Invention, stated that:-
“German Jewish scientists who fled from Nazi Germany revolutionized US innovation. By 1944, more than 133,000 German Jewish émigrés found refuge in the United States. Most of them were urban white-collar workers; one-fifth were university graduates. The National Refugee Service listed roughly 900 lawyers, 2,000 physicians, 1,500 writers, 1,500 musicians, and 2,400 academics.”
Prior to the accession to power of Adolph Hitler, Germans had earned no less than 31 Nobel scientific awards to the UK’s 19 and France’s 15. The USA was a minnow at that time with only six; yet today it is the global leader with 350, the UK is still in second place with 109, France brings up the rear with 39 and Germany, instead of being in first place, is in fourth with 93. It is plain that Germany yielded pole position to the Americans with a dramatic change — not to say interchange — of fortunes.
Israel too benefitted from the Nazi-driven brain drain. Chaim Weizmann persuaded Israel Sieff in April 1933 to create what became the great scientific institute at Rehovot as a direct reaction to the Hitler- inspired exodus.
It is a truism that anti-Jewish racism is a Christian phenomenon. They are two sides of the same coin, and it seems clear that the emigration that racism drives both weakens the country from which the olim depart and strengthens Israel. This observation was certainly true of the great exodus from the USSR and later the Russian Federation. Shimon Perez, as Israeli president, called the Russian aliyah of the 1990s a one time gift from Hashem. At one stage, the joke was that the second language of Israel was Hebrew, there was so much Russian to be heard on the street.
Today, a generation later, the Russians are wholly integrated in hi-tech, the health sector and higher education. Is Russia the poorer for it? Well, consider this: its economy is no larger than that of Italy, whose population is two and a half times smaller than that of Russia. At the same time, the Israeli economy powers ahead. The Jerusalem Post reported last Monday:-
“Israel’s tech sector has broken new ground and raised an unprecedented $25 billion in 2021, according to a report from Start-Up Nation Central (SNC), a non-profit organization that catalyzes growth opportunities by bringing Israeli tech innovation to global business and societal challenges.
The unprecedented figure represents a 136% increase over last year, which concluded with a full-year total of $10.8b. raised. This figure is nearly double the global average growth of 71%, and well exceeds the United States’ 78%, Singapore’s 95%, and the UK’s 105%, according to data compiled from PitchBook.”
Whilst not every oleh and olah can be a genius, every one of them enriches the Israeli scene at the expense of their former home, and their opportunities for advancement in their new home are apparently limitless.
© Howard Epstein – December 2021
