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By the end of December, approximately 20,000 new immigrants will have arrived in Israel since the beginning of the year, the Jewish Agency for Israel said Monday.
That number is 40 percent lower than the 33,247 new immigrants who arrived in 2019, according to figures from the Central Bureau of Statistics.
The international movement has been hit hard by the spread of the virus, as countries, including Israel, on occasion closed their borders to foreigners in an effort to curb infections or ordered a quarantine for travelers.
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The immigrants, from 70 different countries, arrived “despite a year devastated by the global COVID-19 pandemic,” the agency said in a statement.
The Chairman of the Executive of the Jewish Agency, Isaac Herzog, expressed a positive note by meeting with children who immigrated to Israel during the pandemic.
“Something wonderful happened to us: 20,000 Jews immigrated to the State of Israel during this pandemic year. Twenty thousand people who were willing to leave everything behind, in a challenging period of global upheaval, to come and build a new life in Israel, ”Herzog said, according to the statement.
“These olim landed directly in two weeks of isolation in a new country, unknown to all,” he said, using the Hebrew term for immigrants to Israel.
Anticipating the end of the virus crisis, Herzog predicted that “we will see a huge wave of immigration that we are anticipating from around the world.”
Although the number of people who immigrated fell, there was “a sharp increase in people interested in moving to Israel,” the statement said. Over 160,000 immigration inquiries were made and the Agency opened 41,000 aliyah (immigration) application files, double the number in 2019. 28,000 files were opened for people living in Western countries. Among young adults, ages 18-35, there was a 41% increase in open files this year over the 2019 figure.
The agency’s data showed that in the period from January to November 10,200 immigrants arrived from countries of the former Soviet Union. Another 3,120 came from Western Europe, including 2,200 from France, roughly the same number from that country as the previous year.
There were 2,850 immigrants from North America, of which 2,550 were from the United States, according to figures compiled in coordination with the non-governmental group Nefesh B’Nefesh that helps immigration, with a focus on those coming from the United States. There were 1,500 new immigrants from Latin America, about 280 from South Africa, and nearly 90 from Australia and New Zealand.
By the end of the year, a total of 1,200 immigrants are expected to come from Ethiopia, 650 of whom arrived in December as part of Operation Zur Israel, a government plan to bring Ethiopian Jews to Israel. Another 300 Ethiopian Jews will arrive on the last day of the year, the statement said.
In addition to immigrants, there were also 7,500 Jewish young adults from more than 60 countries who came to the country on the Masa Israel Journey volunteer program, a joint plan of the Agency and the Israeli government.
“The coronavirus outbreak triggered unprecedented health, economic and community engagement crises in Jewish communities around the world,” the Agency said.
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