Jewish Immigration 1948–1972

The Law of Return (1950), implemented two years after Israel’s inception, invited all Jews to return ‘home’ to Israel. This meant that between 1948–51 the population was doubled (758,000–1.4 million) by Jewish immigrants arriving from Libya, Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, Turkey, Iraq and post-Holocaust Europe. Many Holocaust survivors came from the fractured communities of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Romania, where they were also fleeing anti-Semitism and Sovietization. After 1951, the rate of immigration temporarily diminished, with 1,200 entering the country every month and 700 leaving. However, after a wave of nationalist movements swept northern Africa, there was an influx of 240,000 Moroccan, Tunisian, Algerian and Egyptian Jews between the mid 1950s and 1967. In the 1960s–70s there was a large influx of Jewish immigrants from the eastern bloc, in addition to Jews from the West, many of whom were right-wing zealots, who went to Israel on ideological grounds.