Even as Western aliyah picks up, new arrivals replace fewer than half of Israeli emigrants

 Aboard a recent Nefesh BNefesh aliyah charter flight in mid-August, Immigration and Absorption Minister Ofir Sofer told The Times of Israel that immigration from Western countries had risen dramatically since the Hamas invasion of October 7, 2023, driven in large part by a resurgence in excitement for the Zionist cause. Emigration from some countries had tripled since 2023, Sofer said.

Those successes are indeed borne out by official data. However, overall immigration is down dramatically when looking beyond the West to also take in Russian-speaking countries, by far the largest contributor of new immigrants.

According to the Central Bureau of Statistics, just 11,314 people moved to Israel during the first seven months of 2025, a decline of about 42 percent from the same period in 2024 and about 60% less than in the first eight months of 2023, a year which saw a major spike in arrivals due to the war in Ukraine.

At the same time, Sergio Della Pergola, one of Israel’s most respected experts on Jewish demographics, says immigration rates are relatively average on a historical basis, but emerging migration trends show worrying signs for the country’s future.

So who is right, and why are there so many different takes?

To fathom what is really happening, let’s take a closer look at the data. Numbers quoted come from the CBS unless otherwise specified. Some numbers are rounded for simplicity.

Russian red herring

According to official CBS numbers, 2024 saw a drop of some 30% in immigration when compared to the year before, to about 32,800. However, as has been the situation for decades, the data from one country skews all the statistics.

“Since the 1990s, Russia has always been the dominant story in the immigration numbers,” Della Pergola explained.

To gain a better understanding of the current state of immigration to Israel, Della Pergola suggests considering Russian-speaking immigration and Western immigration as two distinct components of the overall aliyah picture. Though making up the lion’s share of new immigrants, the factors motivating Russian speakers to move to Israel, or stay home, are often quite distinct from those energizing Western aliyah, with each in the thrall of different trends.

“So if you want to understand what is happening with aliyah, you have to first understand why Russian aliyah has declined by half for each of the past two years,” he said.

In the decades before Russia invaded Ukraine in early 2022, the vast majority of new immigrants, or olim, typically came from Russia and the former Soviet Union, often accounting for as much as two-thirds of the total, Della Pergola said.

After the initial euphoria that followed the fall of Communism starting in 1989, an environment of growing political repression and economic uncertainty led to mass defections, in what Russian sociologists have termed the “fourth wave” of Russian emigration.

With middle-class Russian professionals desperate to move to whatever liberal countries would take them in, some used the path to Israeli citizenship created by the Law of Return, which grants eligibility to anyone with at least one Jewish grandparent, regardless of whether they themselves are considered Jewish. Nearly one million Russian-speakers are believed to have moved to Israel in the years immediately following the dissolution of the USSR, including many who made use of the so-called grandchild clause.

The pace of immigration from that part of the world fell off dramatically over the first two decades of the 2000s, especially as Russia’s economy stabilized, but immigration to Israel from the former USSR skyrocketed again once Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, as people from both countries sought a safe haven from the war zone.

In 2022, immigration soared from 28,000 a year earlier to over 74,000, as aliyah from Russia jumped from 7,700 to 45,000 and Ukrainian immigration rose from 3,100 to 15,000.

Immigration from Russia and the former Soviet Union, which includes Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic states and other nearby republics, has slowed somewhat since then, but still looms large. Some 38,500 new immigrants arrived in 2023, about 22,000 in 2024, each representing about two-thirds of total immigration figures. In the first seven months of 2025, Israel absorbed 6,540 people from the former Soviet Union, a bit more than half of the global total.

But because factors motivating emigrants from Russian-speaking countries often differ radically from those of other immigrants — such as escaping war or economic opportunities rather than Zionism or antisemitism fears — understanding aliyah trends for the rest of the world requires putting the Russian-speaking figures to the side, Della Pergola said.

The West on board

After removing the former Soviet Union numbers, 2024 actually shows a 47% increase over the year before, with nearly 11,000 coming in 2024 compared to 7,500 in 2023. Israel is currently on pace to top 10,000 new immigrants from non-Russian-speaking countries in 2025, according to Della Pergola.

In the United States, immigration rose from about 3,000 in 2023 to 3,200 in 2024, according to the CBS, and aliyah organization Nefesh B’Nefesh has said it expects 2025 to end with as many as 4,000 moving from the US. The organization said it facilitated the arrival of more than 1,000 new immigrants in August alone, marking the busiest month in its 23-year history.

Nefesh B’Nefesh, which also deals with immigrants from Canada, says it experienced an 80% increase in inquiries about moving to Israel immediately following the October 7 attack. The group says the process of opening a file to actually making aliyah takes about 18 months on average, meaning that the spike in inquiries was seemingly only starting to be realized now.

About 47% of people who start working with an aliyah advisor eventually make aliyah, a Nefesh B’Nefesh spokesperson noted.

Making his way to Israel on the Nefesh B’Nefesh charter flight last month, new immigrant Josh Gottesman told The Times of Israel that after October 7, “that desire we’d always had to make aliyah got much stronger… We felt like, ‘How could we not be with our people at this time,'” he said.

In France, home to the largest Diaspora community outside of the US, aliyah numbers have risen steadily in recent years, from about 1,000 in 2023 to over 2,000 in 2024. Della Pergola believes the figure may break 3,000 in 2025.

In the United Kingdom, immigration rose from 372 in 2023 to 676 in 2024, with 2025 on pace to match or beat those figures. Canadian immigration has been stable, with between 270 and 300 immigrants each year.

While October 7 may have been a spark, immigrants are motivated to leave for Israel by a variety of factors, Nefesh B’Nefesh and other organizations say. While some immigrants, particularly those from France, have said they moved to Israel to escape rising antisemitism, those from the US are generally driven by ideological beliefs, nudged by the events in Israel to take action and live the Zionist dream.

To Sofer, that is the real story of immigration at this point. “In most countries, people leave during a war, but in Israel, people come to help,” he has said numerous times.