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In-Depth Information
post — president, chief of staff of the armed forces, and cabinet positions —has been fi lled by
a Mizrahi.
To a large extent, then, the frictions of the 1970s and 1980s have dissipated. By the turn of
the millennium, more than 50 percent of Mizrahim belonged to the middle class; only some
income disparity between Ashkenazim and Mizrahim remains. The high levels of marriage be-
tween Ashkenazim and Mizrahim is often cited as proof of their integration, as is the Mizrahi
presence at the upper echelons of the government, the military, and the business world.
Overall, the Mizrahim are integrated into Israeli society. Polls show that allegiance to
groups based on pre-immigration residence declines in importance with every generation, and
members of both groups rank being Israeli as their primary identity, far above any particular
“ethnicity.” Primary identifi cation of oneself as Israeli also increases with level of education.
Immigrants from Russia and the Former Soviet Union
As late as the 1920s, the Jews of the Soviet Union were much like nineteenth-century Eastern
European Jews. Highly traditional, with a strong sense of community and religion, they were
concentrated in shtetls — small Jewish towns and villages, where their families had lived for
centuries — in such places as today's Belarus and Ukraine. The more modernized, secularized
Jews of the cities spoke Russian rather than Yiddish.
The Communist system Russianized both the rural and the urban groups, however, es-
pecially for later generations. Their communal, cultural, and religious institutions were de-
stroyed, their language was largely eliminated, and their group loyalty was badly eroded. They
had absorbed Russian culture and forgotten most or even all of their own. These Jews were
highly secularized, and there was a high degree of intermarriage with Russian Christians.
Their cousins had immigrated earlier to the Land of Israel from societies in Eastern
Europe —Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Romania —before those societies
were fully taken over by Communist regimes after 1945. These pre-Communist Eastern Eu-
ropean Jews, compared with the post-Communist Jews from the Soviet Union, had ways of
life closer to traditional Jewish life. The Communist-era Jews who went to Israel had, in con-
trast, undergone intensive forced assimilation for many decades. They were certainly used to
modern society, and life under Communism made them eager to enjoy freedom, but Lenin
and Stalin had more infl uence on their lives than rabbis or shtetls did. Most of them did not
identify themselves as Zionists, and many found it a novelty even to think of themselves as
primarily Jews.
By 2000, a total of 1.1 million people from all the former republics of the Soviet Union had
immigrated to Israel, increasing Israel's Jewish population by around 20 percent and the over-
all national population by about 15 percent. The vast majority, about 880,000, arrived in the
decade after 1989. Although there is signifi cant diversity among these groups, in Israeli society
they are collectively referred to as Russian because they hail from the former Soviet Union
and all speak Russian. The new immigrants settled mostly in the cities. In some places, like
Beer Sheba, Ashdod, and Ashkelon — all in the south — they form one-quarter of the entire
population.
