Podcast: Matti Friedman on the Russian Aliyah—Thirty Years Later

This Week’s Guest: Matti Friedman

After a decades-long, worldwide campaign to free Soviet Jewry, in the late 1980s the borders of the Soviet Union were finally opened, allowing its Jews to emigrate to Israel. This period saw approximately one million men and women from the former Soviet Union leave and resettle in the Jewish state. They came in fulfillment of Zionist aspirations, in search of material opportunities, and in pursuit of greater freedom.

At the time that the Russians arrived, Israel had fewer than five million citizens, and these new immigrants brought with them an entirely new set of cultural assumptions and practices. They posed a religious challenge as well, as many of them qualified for Israeli citizenship but did not qualify as Jewish under the requirements of Orthodox law.