by michele chabin
correspondent
The Jewish Agency for Israel will soon unveil a “flex aliyah” program for potential olim who do not want to make the all-or-nothing commitment of living in the Jewish state full time.
Moshe Vigdor, the Jewish Agency’s director general, said the program, which is still in the planning stages but could be implemented by the summer, will provide aliyah-related support services and perhaps certain financial benefits to any diaspora Jew wishing to live in Israel on a trial basis ranging from a few weeks to a year.
The visitor would presumably come to Israel on a trial aliyah visa created specifically for this purpose.
“The way we see it, you don’t have to make a dramatic decision to leave everything behind and come to the Holy Land with no way back. Many potential olim find this model too threatening,” Vigdor said.
Assuming it comes to fruition, flex aliyah will represent a fundamental shift for the Jewish Agency. The group has provided one-way tickets to Israel for the vast majority of immigrants during the past six decades but recently has seen a growing number of its potential clients using Nefesh B’Nefesh to immigrate.
The program shift, Vigdor said, reflects the global reality and the ever-evolving needs and tastes of contemporary Jewry.
“For decades, the Jewish Agency was involved almost exclusively with rescue aliyah from North Africa, the Middle East, the former Soviet Union, Ethiopia, and even at times from South America,” he said. “Today, with the exception of rescue aliyah from Ethiopia, Iran and a handful of other places, what we see is an aliyah of choice.”
In short, today’s Jews move to Israel not because they have to, but because they want to, Vigdor said. The fact that most Jews feel safe in their home countries has resulted in a huge drop in immigration in recent years, according to the organization, based on statistics provided by the Central Bureau of Statistics. Only 19,692 olim arrived in 2007 (down from 20,966 in 2006), the lowest number since 1989.
“[The Jewish Agency] has to adapt itself to the new environment,” acknowledged Oded Salomon, director general of the group’s immigration and absorption department.
Sounding very much like a marketing executive, Salomon said the “modernization process” the Jewish Agency has undergone in recent years has led the organization to pursue “a much more marketing-oriented concept.”
To boost aliyah, he said, “we must define a new target population and build our services and products around this.”
That population will include people with second homes in Israel as well as others who spend long periods of time there, especially graduates of Birthright Israel and MASA, the Jewish Agency’s umbrella body for long-term Israel programs.
Salomon predicted the flex aliyah program will succeed because it will provide a support system that has, until now, been absent. He noted that long-term visitors who have not made aliyah exist in a type of bureaucratic limbo, not eligible for government health benefits or subsidized housing, Hebrew-language classes or any of the other services provided to olim.
As Salomon envisions it, young people would come for three to five months “not only to have an adventure but to be exposed to real life in Israel. We’d like to be more specific in making aliyah an end goal.”
To facilitate this, the Jewish Agency plans on providing accommodations for young people in major cities, where work is abundant but rental prices are astronomically high at the moment.
“We would help them secure internships, work in volunteer programs, help them find a job. During this period they could change their status and become olim. Those who don’t will come back later and in the meantime be good agents for Israel in their home communities.”
CopyrightJ, the Jewish news weekly of Northern California