{"id":1374,"date":"2022-03-21T15:39:48","date_gmt":"2022-03-21T13:39:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/?p=1374"},"modified":"2022-03-21T15:39:48","modified_gmt":"2022-03-21T13:39:48","slug":"the-new-ukrainian-aliyah-tablet-magazine-mar-7-2022","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/2022\/03\/21\/the-new-ukrainian-aliyah-tablet-magazine-mar-7-2022\/","title":{"rendered":"The New Ukrainian Aliyah (Tablet Magazine, Mar. 7, 2022)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"AP
AP PHOTO\/MAYA ALLERUZZO<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Israel\u2019s last wave of Ukrainian and Russian Jews is preparing to absorb the next one<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Matti Friedman<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

New people with old stories are sitting on the benches in Nahariya, the beach town in northern Israel where my parents live. One woman sits in a park near the Jewish Agency\u2019s immigrant absorption center, holding her smartphone and crying as another woman\u2019s voice says on the speaker from Ukraine, \u201cThere are fatalities in Kharkiv.\u201d A crew from the TV news is there to interview these first arrivals, and for an Israeli watching, it seems like headlines and history at once. Kyiv, Lviv, Moscow, the Jewish Agency. Is it the 1990s, or the 1930s? Another woman, Tatyana, embraces two of her three children, fresh from the airport. Her eldest son stayed behind to fight near Dnipro. \u201cIt\u2019s a miracle we made it here,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Israelis are as glued to the war in Ukraine as the rest of the Western world, so involved in the extraordinary course of events that most of us haven\u2019t yet considered the most immediate way this is going to manifest itself here: in a new wave of aliyah, \u201cascent,\u201d the word we like to use for immigration. On Sunday three planes landed with 300 people, and it\u2019s only beginning. Some estimates say 10,000 are coming, some say 10 times that; some, like the Interior Minister, say it could be hundreds of thousands and won\u2019t be limited to people from Ukraine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The old Zionist absorption machinery\u2014ignored by nearly all Israelis nearly all of the time, though it\u2019s more or less the reason the country exists and the reason we\u2019re all here\u2014is creaking back into motion. Israel will try to work its narrative magic, issuing the newcomers a story of strength that obscures their weakness, telling them they\u2019re not homeless but home and that they\u2019re not refugees but\u00a0olim<\/em>, \u201cthose who ascend,\u201d masters of their own fate. This story is one of the secrets of the country\u2019s success. A version of it is shared by everyone else in this town: the original Germans, the Moroccans and Tunisians, the Romanians, the earlier Russians and Ukrainians, the Ethiopians. The rooms at the absorption center probably still smell of injera. That\u2019s why, although Elena and Tatyana may never have been here before, they somehow don\u2019t seem out of place. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

(Read the rest here<\/a>.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Israel\u2019s last wave of Ukrainian and Russian Jews is preparing to absorb the next one Matti Friedman New people with old stories are sitting on the benches in Nahariya, the beach town in northern Israel where my parents live. One woman sits in a park near the Jewish Agency\u2019s immigrant absorption center, holding her smartphone and crying as another woman\u2019s …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1374"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1374"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1374\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1375,"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1374\/revisions\/1375"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1374"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1374"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1374"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}