While a significant number of Soviet olim have applied for travel documents to leave Israel, few have actually used them, Jewish Agency officials say.
Uri Gordon, head of the agency’s Immigration Department, told a gathering of volunteers in Jerusalem on Sunday that the number of Soviet immigrants seeking to leave Israel dropped by more than 40 percent this year compared to 1990.
Gordon was commenting on a poll of Soviet immigrants taken in October by the Tazpit Research Institute. According to the results published last week, nearly 30 percent of the respondents said they hope to be living in another country within the next five years.
Gordon said that 6,400 Soviet immigrants requested laissez-passers, or transit papers, during the first nine months of 1991, compared to 10,900 who applied in the same period last year.
Immigrants normally do not receive Israeli passports in their first year. And they are only allowed to leave the country if they repay all money loaned to them by the Jewish Agency.
But only 38 percent of those Soviet Jews who applied for the temporary travel document this year actually left the country, compared to nearly 50 percent who applied in 1990, he said.
Another agency official explained that “from being unhappy to actually leaving is a long road.
“It is easy to say you want to leave the country, but it is a different story when it comes to packing your bags again, taking the children out of school again, and actually departing,” the official said.
“Many of those who are unhappy here and say they would like to leave are not desperate enough to actually do so,” he added.
Gordon said that while he was gratified by the declining number of immigrant applicants for travel documents, he is concerned that growing unemployment and continuing housing problems means that “this group will grow in the future.”
The Absorption Ministry disclosed, meanwhile, that it, along with the Ministry of Education and Culture and the Jewish Agency, provide “special treatment” to the very best of the 10,000 artists and performers among the 300,000 Soviet olim who have arrived since 1989.
The benefits offered to 2,000 performers rated “very good” to “excellent” include subsidies for music, seed money to set up orchestras and ensembles and scholarships to conservatories.
The 5,000 emigres the ministry classifies as average to good are encouraged to retrain for jobs as music or art teachers or even as Russian-language guides at museums. The remaining 3,000 are deemed unworthy of state support.
The ministry did not say who judges the artists or by what standards.
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