Jews do not immigrate to Israel; they "ascend" or "repatriate" (make aliyah). Frequently they replace their foreign names with new Hebrew ones or start using the Hebrew names they previously used only in the synagogue. They tackle a language that has few cognates with their previous vernacular and most of them master it anyway. There is a minimum of cultural dissonance, because the culture they have entered is theirs; it is the one left behind that was alien.

Yehudit Salama Turkey, 1967

They settle in and settle down. They procreate, start businesses, and take up arms. Eventually they merge with the hosts and absorb newer immigrants by donating, sharing, and tutoring. Thus the Jewish people ingathers itself. Israel, in turn, exists to receive its far-flung exiles. It bestows citizenship on any member of the nation as soon as he or she disembarks unless, finding the haste inexpedient, the newcomer prefers to wait a few years.

Israel is alone among immigration countries in that it neither filters immigrants nor leaves them to their own devices after landing. This policy has evolved over time; the current ethos proposes that the country place all newcomers, especially those with academic or scientific training, in their preimmigration occupations.

Dr. Yelena Luria Riga, Latvia, 1987

The foregoing expresses the ideal. The more one admits its impossibility, the better one can assess Israel's performance over the last five decades. But many immigrants and non-immigrants do live up to it.

The Practice
Practice, while falling short of the ideal, has blunted the host immigrant friction that traumatizes other countries. Israel admits all Jews (and many non-Jews) and concerns itself with all aspects of their absorption, including geographic dispersion. Israelis as individuals accept immigrants selectively, with some of them -- to quote the local aphorism -- loving immigration but hating immigrants. To hate immigration, however, is utter heresy.

The government immerses itself in immigrant absorption in innumerable ways, although much of the traditional top-down micro-management has vanished except for immigrants from Ethiopia. Even during the aliyah nadir of the 1980s, few questioned the need for a minister of immigrant absorption and heavy public investment. For years, and especially in the 1990s, immigrant absorption has been listed as one of the main goals of the State budget. All newcomers qualify for miscellaneous taxpayer funded benefits and reductions; those from "countries of distress," including the former Soviet Union, get additional benefits, which may include a 12-month basic stipend paid in cash or cash equivalents. The dispute about these benefits ("rights" in local parlance) usually focuses on how much, not on whether. The few non-immigrants who take exception to the benefit policy as such, couch their objections in very, very careful terms.

Melting Pot Meltdown
Once landed, olim were long expected to exhibit a 100% quotient of adjustment -- a perfect melting pot. Today that quotient is declining, as the host society fragments and loses confidence in its superiority. Until the 1980s, for example, immigrant media were sponsored and subsidized by establishment entities (mainly political parties) and preached conformity for all but "desert generationists." Today, English and Russian-speaking immigrant media are privately owned and self-sustaining.

In the pre-State era, immigrants risked verbal if not physical assault for conducting their affairs in Diaspora tongues. In late 1997, the Education Ministry promised to give priority to Russian and Amharic as second foreign languages in high schools, albeit without giving an indication of when this would be done.

The melting pot, however, continues to simmer. Conformity pressure persists within Israel's several sub-societies, foremost the Orthodox sector. And one barrier refuses to fall: Immigrants as such tend to be excluded from the ruling and intellectual elite.

Eva Hoffman Budapest, 1988

All groups, however warmly, welcomed, have faced this wall: the Germans of the 1930s, the surviving ghetto fighters and partisans of World War II, the Mizrahim, the Soviet Prisoners of Zion, and today's "Russians." Instead, heroes of yesterday's aliyah struggles are paraded as object lessons to be honored for their feats. Partisans, Holocaust survivors, and Prisoners of Zion are put to pasture on special National Insurance benefits.

Only in the 1990s have major political parties started to reserve slots on their Knesset lists for persons still identifiable as olim, in part to stem the strength of Yisrael Ba'aliyah, the immigrant party of Natan Sharansky, formerly the celebrated Prisoner of Zion Anatoly Shcharansky.