More Ukrainian Jews Making Aliyah to Israel

Due to the increasing escalation of hostilities in Ukraine, the Jewish Agency brought to Israel last week forty Jewish children from Donetsk, Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Zaporizhzhya, Odessa, Mykolayiv and other cities from the country’s southeast. The children, aged 14 to 17 years, will spend two weeks in the “Zman.IL” summer camp, which is organized by the Jewish Agency with the financial support of the Jewish federations of North America and Toronto.

According to the Jewish Agency, the number of repatriates from Ukraine since the beginning of this year increased three times in comparison with last year. Some two thousand repatriates arrived from Ukraine from the end of July, compared to six hundred in the first half of 2013. The Jewish Agency evacuated hundreds of repatriates from Ukraine’s unsafe region with the help of Christian voluntary organizations and the Jewish community of Dnipropetrovsk. They were sent to Israel through Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk, and Kyiv.

From the beginning of 2014 to the end of July, Aliyah from Odessa increased by 371% (509 repatriates in comparison with 108 last year), from Kharkiv by 341% (666 in comparison with 151), from Dnipropetrovsk by 263% (339 in comparison with 93), from Simferopol for 178% (114 in comparison with 41), from Kyiv by 52% (305 in comparison with 201).

Photo: Camp in Israel for young repatriates from Ukraine.

By Shimon Briman