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WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
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Israel
Index
The first legislative act of the Provisional Council of State
was the Law and Administrative Ordinance of 1948 that declared null
and void the restrictions on Jewish immigration imposed by British
authorities. In July 1950, the Knesset passed the
Law of Return (see Glossary),
which stated that "Every Jew has the right to come
to this country as an olah (new immigrant)."
In 1939 the British Mandate Authority had estimated that about
445,000 out of 1.5 million residents of the Mandate were Jews.
Israeli officials estimated that as of May 15, 1948, about 650,000
Jews lived in the area scheduled to become Israel under the
November 1947 UN partition proposal. Between May 1948 and December
31, 1951, approximately 684,000 Jewish immigrants entered the new
state, thus providing a Jewish majority in the region for the first
time in the modern era. The largest single group of immigrants
consisted of Jews from Eastern Europe; more than 300,000 people
came from refugee and displaced persons camps.
The highly organized state structure created by Ben-Gurion and
the old guard Mapai leadership served the Yishuv well in the
prestate era, but was ill prepared for the massive influx of nonEuropean refugees that flooded into the new state in its first
years of existence. Between 1948 and 1952 about 300,000 Sephardic
immigrants came to Israel. Aside from 120,000 highly educated Iraqi
Jews and 10,000 Egyptian Jews, the majority of new immigrants
(55,000 Turkish Jews, 40,000 Iranian Jews, 55,000 Yemeni Jews, and
thousands more from Jewish enclaves in Afghanistan, the Caucasus,
and Cochin in southwest India) were poorly educated, impoverished,
and culturally very different from the country's dominant European
culture. They were religious Jews who had worked primarily in petty
trade, while the ruling Ashkenazim of the Labor Party were secular
socialists. As a result, the Ashkenazim-dominated kibbutz movement
spurned them, and Mapai leadership as a whole viewed the new
immigrants as "raw material" for their socialist program
(see Jewish Ethnic Groups
, ch. 2).
In the late 1950s, a new flood of 400,000 mainly undereducated
Moroccan, Algerian, Tunisian, and Egyptian Jews immigrated to
Israel following Israel's Sinai Campaign (see
1956 War, ch. 5). The
total addition to Israel's population during the first twelve years
of statehood was about 1.2 million, and at least two-thirds of the
newcomers were of Sephardic extraction. By 1961 the Sephardic
portion of the Jewish population was about 45 percent, or
approximately 800,000 people. By the end of the first decade, about
four-fifths of the Sephardic population lived in the large towns,
mostly development towns, and cities where they became workers in
an economy dominated by Ashkenazim.
Data as of December 1988
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