Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Soviet Jewish immigrants at a welcome reception outside their airplane after arriving in Israel, December
1990. (Getty Images / Image Bank.)
Many Soviet immigrants had belonged to the Russian middle class and held high-status jobs
as doctors, engineers, scientists, and artists. Immigration from Russia gave Israel the highest
proportion of classical musicians of any country in the world. In some cases, immigrants had
trouble fi nding work in their professions because those fi elds were already full; their specifi c
specialties were not needed. A few immigrants were mining engineers, for example, and Israel
has no mines. Sometimes their education was deemed insuffi cient — fairly or otherwise — to
qualify them for their old professions. Many had a diffi cult adjustment period. A joke of the
time concerned an offi ce employee who had a heart attack and was saved by the cleaning
woman, who had been a medical doctor in the Soviet Union.
How did Israelis receive this huge new population group? A number of potential problems
could have caused friction. The question of the immigrants' religious affi liation provoked a few
controversies in the Rabbinate but produced no major diffi culties in practice. But there was
some transitional ethnic bias. Prior to the peak of immigration from the former Soviet Union,
only 4 percent of non-immigrant Israelis said they would not want to live in the same build-
ing as Russian immigrants, but by 1994 a full one-quarter of the non-immigrant population
