Photo by
Eitan Elhadez-Barak/TPS-IL on 19 November, 2024
‘We Want to Build Our Family in Israel’: Despite War, 80 French Jews Celebrate Immigration
Jerusalem, 19 November, 2024 (TPS-IL) -- Amid a surge in French Jewish immigration, 80 new immigrants arrived in Israel on Monday night.
“There’s no future outside of Israel, no future,” one man told The Press Service of Israel as his wife and two children smiled and waved flags. “And we want to build our family here in Israel, so that our kids will get a good education and proper values. And of course, we don’t have another country.”
The new arrivals were greeted at Ben-Gurion Airport by friends and relatives who broke out into spontaneous singing and dancing in celebration.
Despite the war, 31,000 immigrants from 100 countries arrived in Israel in the past year, including more than 2,000 from France, according to the Ministry of Immigration and Absorption, and the Jewish Agency, a quasi-governmental organization that facilitates immigration.
Since the outbreak of the October 7 war, antisemitism in France and across Europe has surged.
In July, MK Oded Forer, who chairs the Knesset Committee for Immigration, Absorption and Diaspora Affairs, told lawmakers he attributed the surging interest in part to French elections in which “People and parties entered the French Parliament who support Hamas and antisemitism.”
