More Than Half Of New Immigrants To Israel In 2018 Were Not Considered Jewish
Image by Getty Images
JERUSALEM (JTA) — More than half of the immigrants to Israel in 2018 were not recognized as Jewish under religious law.
According to end of the year data released by the Central Bureau of Statistics, of the 30,300 immigrants who arrived in Israel last year under the Law of Return, some 12,600 were recognized as Jewish and 17,700 were not.
That means 54 percent of the new immigrants are not Jewish. Some 39 percent are recognized as Jewish and 7 percent are Arab.
Under the Law of Return, anyone with a Jewish grandparent can immigrate to Israel. But he or she must have a Jewish mother in order to be registered as Jewish.
Most of the immigrants came from Russia, Ukraine, France and the United States.
Up to 400,000 citizens of Israel are registered as “lacking a religion” by the Interior Ministry because they are not halachically Jewish.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
