Two longtime refuseniks offered different reasons why the majority of Jews leaving the Soviet Union prefer to go to the United States rather than to Israel.
According to Yuri Cherniak, who heads a scientific seminar for refuseniks, Soviet Jews fear moving to an “all Jewish society.”
But Yuli Kosharovsky, who first applied for an exit visa 17 years ago, believes it is simply because America offers a more comfortable life.
The “neshira” or dropout rate — the number of Jews emigrating on Israeli visas who end up settling in other countries — is running at about 90 percent.
In an attempt to curb the problem, the Israeli government decided last summer to deny visas to Soviet Jews who are not committed to settling in Israel. But the policy has not been implemented yet.
According to Cherniak, Jews born and brought up in the Soviet Union are wary of settling in Israel, because they “can hardly absorb the idea of living in surroundings which are different from what they have experienced here.
“So they prefer to move to the United States, which seems to be, overall, more consistent with their previous experiences in a non-Jewish dominated society,” Cherniak said.
Kosharovsky, however, stressed that “people seek better and more comfortable lives, and the United States has more to offer than Israel. It’s just as simple as that,” he told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency during an interview in his Moscow apartment.
‘CAN’T BLAME THEM’
Kosharovsky denied that Jews are “cheating” when they accept Israeli visas but settle elsewhere. “They want out and there is no easy way to get out of this country,” he said. “The only way available for them is to say they want to go to Israel and to travel on Israeli papers.
“Otherwise, they would be stuck here. You really can’t blame them for that,” he said.
Kosharovsky said he favors the idea of direct flights to Israel to reduce the number of “dropouts.”
According to recent statistics, more Soviet Jews are applying now for tourist visas to Israel than for immigration visas. “It’s encouraging,” a diplomat here said.
“When the Soviet tourists come back from Israel, they will tell the truth about what they saw in that country. That is likely to be very different from the horrible picture drawn by the official Soviet media,” the diplomat said.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
