Clandestine Iranian Aliyah
CBNNews.com
December 26, 2007
CBNNews.com - JERUSALEM, Israel - Forty of the estimated 25,000 Jews living in Iran arrived in Israel Tuesday afternoon.
For Iranian Jews, making aliyah is a delicate undertaking that requires careful planning.
The Jewish Agency, which has vowed to aid Iran's remaining Jewish population to immigrate to Israel, said this was the largest single group to arrive from there.
"The Jewish Agency has spared no expense in bringing the Jews of Iran and will work to bring the rest of them to Israel," Yossi Shraga, director of the Jewish Agency's Middle East immigration told The Jerusalem Post.
"The atmosphere in Iran has done the work for us. Anti-Semitism is growing from day to day. This is in total contrast to what the leaders of the Iranian Jewish community are saying," Shraga said.
"Jewish schools have been shut down. A ban has been ordered on the learning and teaching of the Hebrew language. This is not the place they want to live. Through the Jewish Agency, I hope we can bring them all," he said.
The Iranian Jewish immigrants traveled by way of an unnamed third country and as a further precaution, immigration officials did not release their names for publication.
Each new Iranian immigrant will receive $10,000 from the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, which recently teamed up with the Jewish Agency, in addition to the government's immigration aid package, to help them get started in their new home.
Most of Tuesday's arrivals had little financial assets in Iran. They were taken as a group to an absorption center in Beersheba, where they'll hone their Hebrew-language skills and acclimate to Israeli life.
Source: The Jerusalem Post
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