Officials at Israel’s Absorption Ministry are blaming unemployment for the recent decline in Soviet aliyah.
A total of 8,090 immigrants arrived from the Soviet Union in November. That was 1,755 fewer than in October, continuing a decline that began last June when aliyah reached 20,473, its monthly high for the year.
An additional 3,344 Soviet Jews immigrated to the United States, according to figures provided by the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society in New York.
The latest figures for Soviet immigrants to Israel brought to 134,646 the number of Soviet olim who arrived here in the first 11 months of this year. Clearly, the 1991 total will not match last year’s record of 181,759.
Pessimism was rampant last month, mainly because of seemingly bleak prospects in the job market.
Deputy Labor Minister Menahem Porush estimated present unemployment in Israel at 145,000 and predicted it would exceed 200,000 next year. The Finance Ministry said there were 90,000 jobless last month.
But the figures do not necessarily speak for themselves, according to Sever Plotzker, economics editor of the Israeli daily Yediot Achronot, who believes the unemployment crisis has been overblown.
Plotzker pointed out that during 18 months of Soviet aliyah, 140,000 persons joined Israel’s labor force, of whom 100,000 were new immigrants.
In that period, the business sector created 90,000 jobs and the public and service sectors 30,000. Of those 120,000 new jobs, fully half were filled by new immigrants.
Plotzker pointed out that unemployment among veteran Israelis declined from 160,000 in 1990 to 150,000 in 1991, reducing the annual rate from 9.6 to 9 percent.
Those who remain unemployed are hard-core victims of the recession of the 1980s, the hardest hit being women.
About 60,000 women were unemployed prior to the latest wave of Soviet aliyah. In the last quarters, their numbers jumped to 85,000, including 15,000 to 20,000 mainly older women olim.
REPORTS OF POVERTY EXAGGERATED
Jewish Agency officials believe that deteriorating conditions in the Soviet Union will trigger a new wave, bringing in more than 20,000 immigrants a month.
For now, the biggest headache is the estimated 40,000 jobless Soviet olim.
An overwhelming proportion of them are engineers, scientists and performing artists. Their plight, known to relatives and friends back home, is convincing many potential olim to postpone their departure.
“The influx of such large numbers of professionals has distorted the per capita ratio between locally trained personnel and the number of jobs available for them in the existing Israeli labor market,” explained Grace Moussia, director of employment services at the Soviet Jewry Zionist Forum.
“If, for example, Israeli engineers constituted 3 percent of the labor force, this ratio has shot up to 40 percent since the Soviet influx,” she said.
But she played down recurrent Israeli media stories of abysmal poverty among olim.
“These are probably isolated cases of people with a history of family and personal problems in the Soviet Union. The vast majority of new olim are keeping afloat, but their difficult situation is worsening,” Moussia said.
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