The Jewish Agency is planning for the large-scale absorption of Ethiopian Jews this year, even though it is uncertain that the Ethiopian government will let them leave.
At the same time, the World Zionist Organization is sending more emissaries to Argentina, where dire economic conditions are expected to stimulate aliyah by many of that country’s 250,000 Jews.
Those developments were reported to a visiting group of New York fund-raisers by Simcha Dinitz, chairman of the WZO and Jewish Agency Executives.
But even as Dinitz was outlining these plans in Jerusalem, some 300 angry recent immigrants from the Soviet Union demonstrated Tuesday outside the Absorption Ministry office in Netanya.
They complained bitterly of their problems finding jobs and affordable housing and of the runaround they say they are getting at the hands of Israel’s fabled bureaucracy.
Robert Groisman, a 36-year-old mechanical engineer, arrived in Israel with his wife and two young children four months ago. He has not yet found work, but has to pay the equivalent of $400 a month for rent.
Groisman, who speaks only Russian, said he had problems registering his son at the local kindergarten. He was sent from office to office without finding anyone who would enroll his boy.
Robert Golan, chairman of the Association of Soviet New Immigrants in Israel, told Israel Radio that “whatever may have been the bureaucratic problems for Jews wishing to leave the Soviet Union, they were nothing compared to what they find here when they finally arrive home.”
OVER 10,000 SOVIET JEWS IN APRIL
Employees of the absorption offices where the olim go for information about jobs and housing agree with some of the complaints, but attribute the bureaucratic snarls to insufficient staffing. They say they are denied extra help to deal with the flood of immigrants because of budgetary constraints.
Soviet Jews who have been in Israel six months or longer and have still not found work expressed fear of what will happen when the Absorption Ministry cuts off their rent subsidies after their first 12 months in Israel.
Problems such as these are being seen by a delegation of more than 800 American Jewish leaders currently visiting Israel on a mission sponsored by the United Jewish Appeal-Federation of Jewish Philanthropies of New York.
It is the largest New York group ever to visit Israel and includes such prominent political figures as Manhattan Borough President Ruth Messinger, Suffolk County Executive Patrick Halpin and Andrew O’Rourke, the Westchester County executive.
Dinitz told the group that more than 10,000 Soviet Jewish immigrants arrived in April, a new record. Total aliyah from all countries last month was 11,475.
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