Since its establishment, there have been several waves of aliyah – immigration to the State of Israel. In the early 1960s, for example, more than 100,000 Moroccan Jews arrived and, a decade later, they were followed by more than 150,000 Jews from the Soviet Union. Then, following the collapse of the Soviet bloc in the late 1980s, a massive wave of more than 1 million made aliyah. Each of these waves of immigration was highly evident, both in real time – with government-backed programs providing mass housing, absorption and employment solutions – as well as in terms of the impact it had on Israeli society and culture. You might be surprised to learn, therefore, that over the past two and half years Israel has been experiencing another large wave of immigration. Most Israelis are unaware of this under-the-radar wave of aliyah and could not identify these new immigrants; they are oblivious to the reasons they have come to Israel and the difficulties they are facing here.

More than 100,000 people have immigrated to Israel since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. Across the globe, most of the refugees that the war has created are Ukrainian (more than 6 million Ukrainians have fled their homes, compared to around 1 million Russians). In Israel, however, the numbers are reversed. Most of the new immigrants come from Russia – more than 85,000 people so far – and the stream continued even after the October 7 Hamas attack, with around 12,000 having arrived since then.

While Ukrainian refugees have, for the most part, been fleeing battle zones and widespread destruction in their country, Russians who have made aliyah have different reasons. The hardships they are escaping are economic, cultural, and moral. They come from Russia’s largest cities and are generally middle class. In Russia, they enjoyed a relatively comfortable lifestyle and were highly educated; nearly 90 percent of them arrived in Israel with some form of academic degree, and astonishingly, around 12 percent have post-graduate or doctoral qualifications. In conversations with Shomrim, they expressed fear of their own government as the primary reason for fleeing Russia. Some cited personal oppression as civil rights have been eroded, others were concerned about forced conscription to fight in Putin’s war on Ukraine. Additionally, many were motivated by the ramifications of Russia’s international isolation and its devastating effects on the Russian economy.

Close to 1 million Russians had fled their country; many of them found refuge in neighboring countries like Kazakhstan, Armenia and Georgia. Around 10 percent of them came to Israel, citing their connection to Judaism and benefiting from a bundle of incentives for new immigrants and a new beginning. One of them is Mikhail Sarago, a 39-year-old father of two, who told Shomrim about the family’s hasty relocation to Israel and the new challenges they are facing.

“I arrived here from Saint Petersburg in the spring of 2022, not long after the military draft began,” he says, explaining the motive and the rush to get himself and his family out before the draft order arrived on his doorstep. “It really was an emergency situation. Immediately after the war started in Ukraine, I sent my documents again to the Israeli consulate in Saint Petersburg but I was still waiting to hear back from them. Then, when they announced a general call-up, I realized that I couldn’t wait any longer and got on a plane immediately.”

At first, Sarago says, he continued working remotely for his company in Russia – an importer of industrial products – but when his immigration benefits expired, he found that his Russian salary did not cover the basic needs of the family – himself, his wife and their two small children, aged 6 and 2. “We are two working adults with two children and, for the four of us, we barely have one average Israeli monthly salary to live on,” he recently wrote in a popular Facebook group set up to provide support to these new Russian-speaking immigrants to Israel. “I have no idea how to get out of this situation; I won’t get paid any more by my current place of work, but other places are offering less money for more work. Even training for a new profession costs money and where will I find the time for that? I am on the verge of utter despair. Returning to Russia is out of the question. And where else could I possibly go?”

The “absorption basket” is designed to help new immigrants financially during their first six months in Israel. It currently stands at around 20,000 shekels ($5,500) per person, divided up into payment of less than 3,000 shekels ($850) per person. For the next five years, new immigrants get a few hundred shekels a month to help with rent, but the government is now trying to slash this to a ridiculous 363 shekels ($100) – and for just two years.

Financial aid for new immigrants has not been adjusted for inflation since the 1990s and many of them say that it was impossible to live off the money that the Ministry of Aliyah and Integration provides in the first few months in Israel. This makes it very hard for them to find the time to learn Hebrew and forces them to look for work that does not require them to speak the language – which, in turn, impedes the process of integration. Sarago says that many of the Russian-speaking immigrants want to learn Hebrew in an ulpan, where they would study intensively for several weeks, but even when they found the time and showed up, they discovered that there are not enough teachers. This is, in part, because of the paltry salary that the state pays, which is sometimes below the minimum wage. According to a report published by the Knesset’s Research and Information Center, more than 3,600 new immigrants were waiting for a place in an ulpan in January 2023 – around half of them living in central Israel. The average waiting time, according to the report, was around six months.

Sarago currently works in a factory in Ashkelon, where he lives, but the family is clearly suffering from severe financial hardship. “The best-case scenario is that, after we’ve paid rent and for the children’s kindergarten, and once the credit card payments are made, we have nothing left. But there are months that I have to borrow money for expenses so that we do not go into overdraft,” he explains. His wife and children left Ashkelon for a while after October 7, but Sarago stayed behind to continue earning a living. And still, despite all the hardships, the option of returning to Russia is unthinkable. “What’s happening now in Russia is a like a plague, with real fascists,” he tells Shomrim. “I don’t want to have anything to do with it and I will not let my children grow up into that.”

No censor: the liberal profile of the new arrivals

The problems that Sarago is facing may remind veteran Israelis of those encountered by the wave of aliyah in the 1990s, after the fall of the Soviet Union, when more than 1 million Russian speakers came to the country. That wave of immigration “fundamentally changed Israel demographically and socially,” according to Dr. Veronika Kostenko from Tel Aviv University, who recently participated in a research project conducted by the European University Institute into migration from Russia in 2022. The study included a survey of more than 10,000 people who left Russia for more than 100 different countries.

Kostenko, along with researcher Varvara Preter from Ben-Gurion University, point out that the current wave of aliyah not entirely new and that it could be seen as part of a wave that started in 2011, when there were widespread protests across Russia, or that of 2014, when Russia invaded the Crimean Peninsula. “Those who arrived prior to 2022 and those who arrived after the war broke out in Ukraine belong, in principle, to the same Russian middle class,” Preter says of the immigrants arriving in the current wave.

She explains that, in addition to medical and technology professionals, many of the new arrivals work in the fields of social science and the arts – the media, education, scriptwriters, artists and activists – and their work is therefore necessarily in Russian. These are professionals who were forced to leave because of the Russian policy of censorship and the restriction on freedom of expression. However, having left their native country, they are finding it hard to use their skills effectively, especially given a lack of proficiency in the Hebrew language.

According to Kostenko, therefore, “there are a lot of unemployed people in Israel. All of the people who wrote in Russian, who are connected to the Russian academic world, who do not have international foundations, are in a very difficult place. They have to fundamentally reinvent themselves and do something entirely new. It’s hard to find any practical use in Israel for insights into 18^th-century Russian history.”

In a conversation with Shomrim, Vsevolod Bederson, who used to be a lecturer in political science at Perm State University and who arrived in Israel with his wife and small son two years ago, shares his experiences of these challenges. Bederson began the immigration process even before the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, but political pressure forced him to accelerate his departure. He says that the rector of the university where he was employed was so insistent that he left that he even threatened to close the whole political science department. It is not inconceivable that this was motivated by Bederson’s political activity, which included having been an advisor to opposition candidates in municipal elections and his efforts to have the university rescind an honorary doctorate it had awarded to a certain politician.

Bederson says that he visited Israel in 2019 to look into the option of relocation. Then the coronavirus pandemic erupted, however, and it was only in January 2021 that he and his family submitted the paperwork needed to immigrate. He contacted the consulate again in November of that year but no concrete progress was made toward the family’s departure from Russia. Then the war in Ukraine broke out and they decided to leave.

Bederson says that one of the reasons for leaving Russia was the oppressive nature of the regime and that pressure on his would only intensify. This concern was only exacerbated by the work of his wife, Olga – a lawyer who helps activists and protestors. She has also worked with Russian opposition figures, including people close to Alexei Navalny, whose death in a Russian jail earlier this year has been treated with great suspicion. The Bedersons believed that, if they were to remain in Russia, the persecution and the oppression would only get worse. Their son, they say, is yet to receive Israeli citizenship since the closest Jewish relative in his family tree is four generations distant and he will have to live in Israel for three years before receiving official documentation, irrespective of his parents’ status.

Bederson almost managed to find a place in the Israeli academy but, shortly after October 7, he was informed that the budget was no longer available to pay for his position. He currently writes for several Russian media outlets, many of which are defined as “undesirable” according to Russian federal law – anyone cooperating with organizations on the list could be jailed for up to five years – and is considering changing profession. He has also trained as tour guide – a far cry from the academic career he pursued in Russia – but he says that one of the benefits of the unexpected career change is that he is discovering Israel for himself, while learning how to represent it to tourists.

Goodbye to the world of glamor: ‘I realized it was the end’

As researchers Kostenko and Preter point out, members of the Russian middle class who immigrate to Israel are often politically aware and oppose President Putin and his war in Ukraine. According to a study conducted by Kostenko, around 20 percent of the Russians who have moved to countries like Georgia, Armenia, Serbia and Israel since 2022 experienced direct repression, such as being arrested or charged with a crime. Anatoliy Belyy is not one of them. In fact, he could have happily continued living the good life in Moscow, ignoring the reality around him. Belyy is one of the most famous actors in Russia, having appeared in many popular movies and television shows and with a 20-year career in countless roles at the Chekhov Moscow Art Theatre. He is a household name in Russia but, despite his success and standing in the country, he had no hesitation when deciding to leave Russia two years ago. He now lives in Netanya, where his mother and sister have lived since the early 2000s.

Shomrim met with Belyy at a branch of the ubiquitous Israeli Arcaffé chain in the same compound as the Netanya IKEA store, far from the glamor, the camera and the red carpet he was used to in Moscow. Belyy recalls how, before the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, he still hoped with all his heart that the situation in Russia would improve. “I genuinely hoped that something would change in Russia,” he says, “and that new political powers would rise up. In the past, leaders like Yeltsin and Gorbachev came from nowhere and changed the country’s trajectory. I believed that something like that could happen again. I believed in Navalny.”

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was, for Belyy, the point of no return. “That was it. I realized the game was up. That was the end,” he says. “My Ukraine” – as a child, his family would take their summer vacation there and his parents were originally Ukrainian – “was attacked by the country I lived in. I could not continue living there, I couldn’t breathe there. I decided that I am no longer willing to live in that country. Russia has chosen a path of aggression and fascism.”

Antisemitism is also nothing new to Belyy. He experienced it as a child from his classmates in the industrial city of Tolyatti where he grew up, but now his Jewish roots have afforded him the possibility of obtaining Israeli citizenship. “This is the first time in my life that Judaism has been to my advantage,” he points out with a smile. In July 2022, he landed at Ben-Gurion airport with his family and immediately felt the support. “We landed at night and were taken to a room at the airport, where my wife and I were given our new immigrant identification cards. The woman working there recognized me. She gave us her phone number and told us to contact her if there’s anything we need and she would help us. I had goosebumps and my wife shed a few tears. We were not expecting anything like that.”

Now Belyy is trying to rebuild himself. He feels fortunate to have been given such a warm reception by the Russian-speaking community in Israel and is determined to take the “next step” and start appearing in Hebrew. “I can’t deny that it’s a massive challenge but I want to integrate and be part of this country. I hope that I will also manage to reach a Hebrew-speaking audience.”

Cross: LGBTQ persecution: ‘We migrated as a same-sex couple’

Text: Economic and cultural challenges are not the only ones facing the new arrivals in Israel. There are also identity-based issues. As the war in Ukraine was raging, Russian authorities also intensified their crackdown on the LGBTQ community in Russia, including a decision in 2023 which ruled that the “international LGBTQ movement” is an “extremist organization” and that displaying symbols linked to LGBTQ groups is a criminal offense.

 Many members of the LGBTQ community have left Russia as a result of these policies. One of them is Hari, who made aliyah with her partner. “We are an LGBTQ couple,” she says in a conversation with Shomrim, “and we did not feel secure in Russia. Apart from that, after the start of the war against Ukraine, we realized that the situation could get even more dangerous for us. We had spoken out openly against the war and we knew we had to leave Russia to escape persecution.”

“We immigrated as a same-sex couple,” she adds, “but we had a problem: the Law of Return only recognized my wife.” Hari and her partner married in an online ceremony conducted from Utah in the United States. Russia, of course, does not recognize same-sex marriages but it turns out that Israel also did not know how to deal with such cases, according to Hari. “My wife got citizenship immediately after we arrived but the authorities here only issued me with a tourist visa. Unfortunately, it’s hard to live in Israel on a tourist visa. I can’t work, it’s hard to get health insurance and if I want to leave the country, I have to get a new entry permit, a special permit allowing me to return.

“My wife got all of the benefits given to new immigrants as if she were a single woman. For us, it was a year full of uncertainty; we didn’t know what would become of us. One of things I was afraid of was that I would be told to leave Israel. We were literally waiting for an answer from the Interior Ministry.”

After a year, Hari managed to obtain citizenship – thanks in large part to Reform Rabbi Olya Weinstein, the CEO of Project Kesher in Israel, which has helped hundreds of couples who have found themselves in a similar situation. The assistance was not only legal but also emotional and, over the past two years, has also included Hebrew lessons. “We see two men or two women in a relationship, various genders and all kinds of cases,” Weinstein says. “But they all have one thing in common: No one wants to deal with them. From a bureaucratic perspective, it’s very difficult.”

According to Weinstein, in many cases, only one partner can submit a request under the Law of Return, and there are very few ways to prove that they are in a genuine relationship. "The Israeli authorities say that you can stay in Israel for three months as a tourist – and then it’s bye-bye. These couples often lived together beforehand; they have families and children, pets, apartments, feelings, and common friends. Then they come here and are told that they are nothing."

In addition to all the bureaucratic challenges, same-sex couples also live in constant fear of being deported back to Russia if they are not able to sort out their status. “We hear endless tales about the danger of deportation. It’s a question of life and death: We understand what’s happening in Russia, we know that if one partner stays here, the family is destroyed, and if the other partner goes back, God only knows what awaits them there.”