The Law of Return is a law which was passed by the government of Israel in July 1950 which stipulates that any Jewish person with one or more Jewish grandparent can relocate from anywhere in the world to Israel and acquire citizenship there. The law was extended in 1970 to include the spouses of a Jewish person, even if the spouse is not themselves Jewish. The Law of Return was promulgated at a time when the population of the fledgling state of Israel was quite low just a few years after it was first officially established. At that time there were approximately 1.2 million Jewish people in Israel. The Law of Return was utilized in the decades that followed and continues to be used to this day. It led to a considerable increase in the population of Israel. By 1970 there were nearly three million people living in the country, then around 4.6 million in 1990, before reaching nine million in the late 2010s. The Law of Return has contributed substantially to this growth.[1]
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Law of Return chronology of eventsLaw of Return chronology of events
At the end of the Second World War, the Jewish population in what would become Israel, which had been under British Mandate administration since it was taken from the crumbling Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War, was around half a million strong. As the Nazi concentration camps were liberated across Central and Eastern Europe and the continent began to rebuild, a very large proportion of the continent’s Jewish people decided to make Aliyah to Israel rather than rebuild their lives in countries like Poland where the Holocaust had just been perpetrated. As a result, the number of Jewish people in Israel when the creation of the Israeli state was declared in May 1948 had increased by approximately 60% to around 800,000.[2] It swelled further in the two years that followed as the First Arab-Israeli War led to the exodus of the substantial Jewish populations from countries like Iraq, Egypt, Yemen, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya and Turkey. The population of Israel grew by a further 70% or so before the end of 1950.[3]
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It was in the context of this rapid population growth and migration that the Israeli Knesset decided to pass a law formally recognizing the right of the Jews of the diaspora to return to Israel and acquire Israeli citizenship. What became known as the Law of Return or ḥok ha-shvūt was passed on the 5th of July 1950. The law stated clearly “Every Jew has the right to come to this country as an oleh.” An oleh is a person undertaking Aliyah to Israel from somewhere else in the world. David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister and the primary national founder, who was in office when the Law of Return was first passed in 1950, elaborated on this to argue that the law was simply giving expression to something which was inherently clear, that it was the right of any Jewish person of the diaspora to return to the Jewish homeland. As such the Law of Return also included a clause whereby it was applied retrospectively to any Jewish person who had returned to Israel in times gone by: “Every Jew who has immigrated into this country before the coming into force of this Law, and every Jew who was born in this country, whether before or after the coming into force of this Law, shall be deemed to be a person who has come to this country as an oleh under this Law.”[4]
A substantial amendment was made to the Law of Return in 1970 to state clearly that non-Jewish spouses of Jewish people were also included in the right of return. The law remains in place down to the present day. It has facilitated waves of mass migration into Israel from specific countries at certain times. For instance, following the Iranian Revolution at the end of the 1970s, there was a general exodus of Iranian Jews from that country to Israel.[5] The quite sudden collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s witnessed the migration of around one million Jewish people from Eastern Europe to Israel between the late 1980s and the end of the twentieth century.[6] Sharp rises in Israel's population were seen during these periods.
Extent of migration through the Law of ReturnExtent of migration through the Law of Return
As of 2021 it is estimated that around 3.4 million Jewish people have made Aliyah to Israel in line with the Law of Return. One gets a sense of the cosmopolitan nature of this migration in recent times by examining where the migrants from the first nine months of 2021 were originating from. The largest number of olim during that period came from Russia with just over 5,000. A little over 3,000 came from the United States, the second largest source of olim in 2021. France was only slightly behind with just over 2,800. It is not surprising to find a large number of Jewish people still migrating from Ukraine and other parts of Eastern Europe, given historic Jewish settlement here. Further down the list, though, we begin to see surprising areas of Jewish migration. Over 600 olim came from Argentina in that period. Nearly 1,600 arrived from Ethiopia in line with the Israeli government’s Operation Tzur Israel program to encourage Ethiopian Jews to make Aliyah under the Law of Return. This is a snapshot of the manner in which the Law of Return continues to impact on migration into Israel three-quarters of a century after it was first promulgated.[7]
Demographic impact of the Law of ReturnDemographic impact of the Law of Return
The demographic impact of the Law of Return is a complicated thing to assess. A simple assessment of the population growth of the Israeli state since 1950 would suggest that it has been transformative. The population of the country was around 1.4 million when it was first made law in 1950. Today nearly ten million people live in Israel, a sevenfold increase. Not all of that expansion is due to people making Aliyah, but a very sizable proportion is. Still, it’s debatable whether a single law can be identified as the sole cause of this level of migration. Much of it would have happened without the Law of Return and as Ben-Gurion noted, the legislation was only meant to give formal expression to what was an established principle of the Israeli state. Nevertheless, as a symbolic statement of the right of olim to make Aliyah it must be viewed as a contributory factor in the huge growth in the Israeli population since the middle of the twentieth century.[8]
See alsoSee also
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- Israel, Immigration Lists records collection on MyHeritage
- Israel Genealogy Research Association - IGRA records collection on MyHeritage
- Israel, Marriages and Divorces records collection on MyHeritage
- Worldwide Jewish Burial Registry records collection on MyHeritage
- Researching Your Jewish Ancestors at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
- Jewish Family Research Challenges at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
- Jewish Resources on the Genealogy Giants at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
- Jewish Genealogy on JewishGen.org at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
- Finding Jewish Records in the MyHeritage Search Engine at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
References
- ↑ https://www.prb.org/resources/israels-demography-has-a-unique-history/
- ↑ Ori Yehudai, ‘Jewish Repatriation from Palestine to Europe, 1945–48’, in Jewish Social Studies, Vol. 20, No. 2 (Winter, 2014), pp. 69–110.
- ↑ https://www.worldjewishcongress.org/en/news/the-expulsion-of-jews-from-arab-countries-and-iran--an-untold-history
- ↑ https://www.nbn.org.il/life-in-israel/government-services/rights-and-benefits/the-law-of-return/
- ↑ https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jews-of-iran
- ↑ Larissa Remennick, ‘Transnational community in the making: Russian-Jewish immigrants of the 1990s in Israel’, in Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Vol. 28 (2002), pp. 515–530.
- ↑ https://www.jewishagency.org/aliyah-to-israel-increased-by-31-in-2021/
- ↑ https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/population-of-israel-1948-present