Following the publication of the official year-end statistics by the Jewish Agency for Israel, Nefesh B’Nefesh assisted a total of 3,546 new immigrants (olim) from North America in cooperation with the Jewish Agency for Israel, Keren Kayemeth LeIsrael, Israel’s Ministry of Aliyah and Integration, and the Jewish National Fund-USA.
During the past year, Nefesh B’Nefesh facilitated 16 special aliyah flights from North America, bringing 381 families with 674 children, and an additional 1,579 singles, many of whom volunteered for the Israel Defense Forces as lone soldiers.
These new arrivals ranged in age from seven-weeks-old to age 97, mostly from New York, California, New Jersey, Florida, Ontario, Maryland, Quebec, Illinois, Pennsylvania and Texas.
“In addition to our efforts to help those making aliyah in 2018, it has been extremely important for us to respond to national challenges by bringing physicians to help with the local doctor shortage, and through new olim who are developing the country’s northern and southern regions,” said Rabbi Yehoshua Fass, co-founder and executive director of Nefesh B’Nefesh. “It has been an incredible privilege to have assisted thousands of olim this past year in fulfilling their Zionist dreams, and we are looking forward to helping many more newcomers in 2019.”
Among the top cities to welcome new immigrants in 2018 were Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Beit Shemesh. The recently launched Nefesh B’Nefesh–KKL “Go Beyond” initiative successfully facilitated the aliyahof hundreds of olim to Israel’s northern and southern regions, most notably to Haifa and Beersheva.
Nefesh B’Nefesh’s employment and government-advocacy departments continued to assist medical professionals, with 58 doctors from North America moving to Israel to help with the local Israeli shortage of physicians. The medical professionals are assisted with obtaining their employment and health-care licenses, and contribute greatly to the Israeli health-care system.
Your story about emigrants from North America, presumably mostly Americans, and gushing about their skills, including MD’s, confirms my view that Israel is a strategic rival to the USA. Your country was originally founded by folks who could have become Americans, but chose otherwise. Nobody would argue that, pound for pound, Jewish folks have contributed more to America than any other ethnic group, including mine. America is a great place to be Jewish (and Catholic & Muslim, too). Not only do Americans who are Jewish by faith or tradition think they are part of this society like everybody else, but so do their neighbors. Ever hear of Joe Liebermann and Bernie Sanders? The se realizations caused me to wonder why the USA cared if there was a Jewish State at all? What do we get out of supporting Europeans displacing the Indians, oops, the Palestinians, who, like Americans, had nothing to do with the Holocaust?
America is the land of the free, but emotionally, we think of ourselves as the place folks immigrate too, not from. So, to the folks who leave here to a colony in SW Asia, don’t let the screen door bump in the butt on the way out. Also, turn in your passports. Your ancestors escaping the horror of Europe at Ellis Island all gladly renounced the Hapsburg, Romanov, or Hohenzollern empires. Do the same.
Love
Joe Martin