Since the 18th century (starting with the Aliyah of Yehuda he-Hasid), immigrants from "Russia" (in the broadest sense—the Russian Empire, the USSR, or the CIS) have played a significant and, at times, central role in the history of the Jews of Eretz Yisrael and the State of Israel. Demographically and culturally, approximately one-third of all Israeli Jews trace their roots to this region in one way or another.

It was Russian Jews who initiated Zionist repatriation, constituting the vast majority of immigrants of the First (1882–1907), Second (1907–1914), and Third Aliyah (1919–1921). Half of the representatives of the Fourth Aliyah (1924–1929) arrived from Poland, which before 1917, along with the territories of modern Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic states, Moldova, and some western regions of Russia, was part of the so-called Pale of Settlement of the Russian Empire. Strictly speaking, immigrants from this region and their descendants formed the core of Israeli society and the country's cultural, political, military, intellectual, and economic establishment (the so-called "First Israel").

This group shaped most of Israel's social and cultural codes, as well as the initial civil, economic, and political institutions of the Jewish Yishuv and the State of Israel, along with the local version of the "melting pot" based on Zionist Hebrew culture. It is no coincidence that representatives of this first generation of "Russian" Jews proved to be the least "Russian" of all groups of Israelis of Eastern European origin and remain, in the fullest sense, "Israelis" (referred to by Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling as "Ahusalim"—long-established, affluent secular Ashkenazi Jews, the Israeli equivalent of American WASPs)[1].

In subsequent years, Jewish repatriation from the USSR, and later from post-Soviet countries, experienced ebbs and flows but never ceased. It manifested once again at the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st centuries when Israel received two large groups, arriving respectively in 1969–1980 and from 1989 to the present. According to data from the Jewish Agency for Israel (Sokhnut) and the Israeli Ministry of Aliyah and Integration, over 1.3 million immigrants have arrived in Israel from Russia/USSR/CIS in the past and current centuries. This figure includes 52,350 olim of Russian-Jewish origin who arrived before the establishment of the state; 37,451 from May 1948 to 1969, 149,740 in the 1970s, 28,763 in the 1980s, and approximately 1.1 million from 1990 to December 2019.[2]

"Russian Neo-Zionism"

In September 1989, as Gorbachev's USSR entered an advanced stage of crisis, the so-called "Great Aliyah" began—a mass repatriation of Eastern European Jews to Israel, which became one of the most prominent global phenomena of the late 20th century. It was preceded by two decades of struggle for the national revival of Soviet Jewry and the re-establishment of organized Jewish life and the Zionist movement, which by then had seemed nearly destroyed by the Communist authorities.

These processes were initiated by a generation of Soviet Jews whose national consciousness was shaped under the influence of Israel's miraculous victory in the Six-Day War of June 1967 over the armies of six Arab nations[3]. No less miraculous was the emergence of "Russian Neo-Zionism" itself and the revival of Jewish organizations in the USSR following the almost total eradication of most civil, religious, and once-influential Jewish political institutions in the late 1920s and early 1930s. This was compounded by the destruction of the bulk of non-political structures during the Nazi genocide and Stalinist repressions of the pre-war and post-war decades[4]. By the 1970s, only fragments of the rich communal, cultural, and national-political tradition of local Jewry remained in the USSR[5].

The stance of the Soviet authorities varied from the suppression of all forms of organized Jewish life to permitting, in certain years, the activities of religious and cultural organizations[6] and a more "liberal" approach toward Jewish emigration. Periods of severe crackdowns were occasionally interspersed with the creation of "official" Jewish structures—surrogates of national institutions whose attempts to step beyond their designated control-and-publicity boundaries were immediately and harshly suppressed. Similarly, attempts by Jewish activists to use the framework of the few remaining religious congregations to form broader educational, cultural, youth, and other Jewish initiatives were likewise shut down.[7]

Independent Jewish institutions were mostly represented by small, underground groups of activists fighting for Aliyah and national and civil rights. Attempts to establish such structures had been made back in the 1940s and 1950s, but it was only with the emergence of a new generation of Jewish leaders in the 1970s that these associations acquired a new qualitative dimension[8].

Ideological divisions within the Jewish dissident movement of the 1970s and 1980s included disagreements between the "politicians" (or "emigrants")—who viewed mass emigration as the only solution to the national problems of Soviet Jewry and focused on protest-based methods to secure exit visas—and two factions of "culturalists," who sought to revive and develop Jewish culture within the USSR. One of these factions saw this as a temporary solution while the gates of Jewish emigration from the USSR were closed, whereas the other—the "legalist culturalists"—viewed it as a long-term goal (this group was willing to engage in limited cooperation with the authorities to develop Jewish culture in the USSR).

However, during the underground years, these disagreements were not overly pronounced and concerned methods rather than the actual substance of their work. Only at the very end of the Soviet era, between 1984 and 1989, did the proponents of these three currents formally organize within the Zionist Federation of the USSR (Irgun Tzioni), the Association of Hebrew Teachers (Ihud Ha-Morim), and the semi-official Jewish Cultural Association, though ideological distinctions among these short-lived groups remained largely blurred.

The core of the new type of Jewish dissident organizations and communal associations was the rapidly growing group of "refuseniks," starting in the 1970s. This term referred to individuals who, under various pretexts, were denied permission to leave the USSR. However, in 1969, influenced by domestic circumstances and international pressure, the authorities agreed to ease emigration policy to rid the country of what they hoped would be a small group of "problematic Jewish elements." Yet the leadership quickly realized that the potential for Jewish emigration vastly exceeded their calculations, and they shifted toward a gradual reduction of its scale, virtually closing official exit channels by 1980–1981. The total number of Jewish emigrants in 1980 was 2.5 times lower than in 1979, when the wave of Jewish emigration from the USSR peaked (at over 51,000 people). In 1981, Jewish emigrants (around 9,500) were already half the number of the previous year, and over the following five years, the flow ranged from several hundred to just over a thousand people annually[9].

At the same time, the authorities continued to accept exit applications, thereby increasing the number of "refuseniks" and, consequently, activists within the Soviet Jewish movement. (In Ukraine, for instance, according to Communist Party records, approximately 80% of Jews who had been refused exit visas participated in this movement in 1980)[10]. Nevertheless, despite official obstruction, more than 300,000 Jews and their family members left the country between 1969 and 1988. However, fewer than

60% of these emigrants actually reached Israel. The rest headed to the United States, Canada, Australia, or Western European countries. This initially minor "drop-out" phenomenon of individuals leaving the USSR on Israeli visas took on significant proportions in the second half of the 1970s: in 1976–1977, the number of Soviet Jews emigrating to Western countries equaled the number of repatriates to Israel (7,000–8,000 people each). In 1979, when exit peaked, and in the following year of 1980, the number of emigrants traveling to destinations other than Israel was already double that of repatriates. With the renewed surge in Jewish emigration from the USSR in 1987–1989, 70% to 80% of Soviet Jews leaving the Soviet Union used the "Israeli channel" to emigrate to the US and other Western countries[11].

In any case, the "Aliyah of the 1970s" brought more than 170,000 immigrants from the USSR to Israel, expanding the country's Jewish population at the time by 7–8%. But the significance of this group was not merely numerical. The "generation of the seventies," mostly second- and third-generation Russian-speaking Jews, were largely products of acculturation within non-Jewish Soviet society. While remaining Jewish by origin and self-identification, they were, first and foremost, Russian by culture. Only remnants of the traditional Eastern European Jewish culture persisted among them, which, compared to the memory of the Holocaust, a pro-Israel sentiment, the experience of living under state-sponsored antisemitism, and a value system perceived by their surroundings as "Jewish," was far from the primary element of their Jewish identity.

In other words, representatives of the second wave of Russian-speaking Aliyah differed sharply in language, culture, and, most importantly, in their Russian-Jewish consciousness from the Jews who had arrived from Russia and the USSR in the first half of the 20th century and laid the foundations of the Jewish national home in Palestine/Eretz Yisrael. Consequently, these "cousins" who began arriving in Israel after an almost 50-year hiatus were no longer perceived as "their own" by the descendants of the "founding generation" of Russian Jews. Furthermore, it soon became apparent that the cultural and political elites of different generations of "Russian" Jews in Israel held fundamentally divergent views on the nature and role of the Jewish national state in the postmodern era.

By the beginning of the Aliyah from the USSR, the classical Zionism of the "founding generation" (which held that Israel, first, realizes the Jewish people's right to national self-determination and, second, serves as a "safe haven" for persecuted Jews) was already in a state of crisis. This was particularly true for the "melting pot" ideology, which had lost its relevance in a multicultural context. The conservative faction of the "old" elites of the "First Israel" was still trying to find a solution within the classical Zionist model, while the "New Left" introduced the post-Zionist slogan of transforming Israel from a Jewish state into a Middle Eastern "state of all its citizens."

The intellectual and political leaders of the "Russian" Aliyah of the 1970s sought to position themselves in this debate by offering society the concept of "Neo-Zionism." Like "classical Zionists," these leaders continued to view Israel as the center of the Jewish world, and the preservation of the state's Jewish character was, for them, its very raison d'être. At the same time, they insisted on combining the principles of classical Zionism with the creative utilization in Israel of the heritage of the Russian-Jewish diaspora (focusing on high standards of education, general culture, and technical progress), as well as the "new Russian-Jewish nationalism" stimulated by Israel's victory in the Six-Day War[12]. In the 1970s, the traditional Israeli elites responded to the "Russian Neo-Zionists" with: "Very interesting, but thank you, no." For their part, the immigrants themselves, against the backdrop of highly successful professional and social integration into Israeli society, were psychologically prepared to accept the existing rules of the game[13]. It is telling that the political experiments of that Aliyah—the "Nes" party (1977) and the "List for Russian Olim" (1981)—received less than 1% of the vote and failed to enter the Knesset. However, the new wave of mass Russian-speaking Aliyah starting in September 1989 changed the situation fundamentally.

"The Third Generation"

The struggle for emigration and the legalization of the underground Zionist movement in its classical forms concluded in the USSR in 1987. The onset of democratization weakened ideological barriers; the authorities legalized the activities of Jewish cultural societies and revised exit regulations (though the final version of the new law was not passed until 1991)[14]. Within a year, the number of individuals wishing to leave the USSR increased more than fourfold. Following the removal of most restrictions, the authorities approved virtually all applications (97.6%). The number of "refuseniks" fell fivefold as they finally received the long-awaited opportunity to repatriate to Israel.

From the late 1980s onward, the Jewish movement, joined by new leaders and activists, operated under different forms dictated by the changed political landscape. It was during this period, at the height of Perestroika, that the latent conflict between the various ideological currents of the Jewish movement became overt. At the first legal congress of Jewish organizations and communities of the USSR in Moscow in December 1989, "radical Zionists" from Irgun Tzioni, led by Lev Gorodetsky, demanded the establishment of a Repatriation Committee to carry out a mass "evacuation" of Soviet Jews to Israel. Failing to secure the support of the majority of participants, they walked out of the congress. In contrast to this position, "moderate Zionists" and "culturalists" (Mikhail Chlenov, Josef Zissels, Samuil Zilber, among others) proposed the creation of the Vaad (Confederation) of Jewish Organizations and Communities and local communal autonomy[15].

These developments coincided with the deep crisis of the Soviet regime and the onset of the "Great Aliyah" in September 1989. By December 1991, when the USSR officially ceased to exist, more than 340,000 Soviet immigrants had arrived in Israel, representing nearly 10% of the country's Jewish population at the time and, as is widely recognized, reversing negative ethno-demographic trends. Over the past three decades, nearly 1,113,000 former Soviet Jews and their family members have arrived in Israel directly from the USSR and post-Soviet countries (as of July 2019). (An additional 9,000 individuals born in the former USSR repatriated to Israel from third countries and are therefore not reflected in official statistics as "Russian-speaking" Israelis). Factoring in natural population changes—births, deaths, and emigration from the country—the size of Israel's "Russian-speaking" community in mid-2019 still exceeded 1 million people[16]. Thus, immigrants from the former USSR, including children born to Russian-Jewish families within Israel, currently account for approximately 13% of the total population and 18% of the country's Jewish population.

Naturally, this group is internally diverse, and the differences among its segments that arrived in Israel in different years are, in terms of socioeconomic and cultural parameters, no less significant than those between the Aliyah of the 1970s and the wave of the 1990s. The only difference is the absence of a psychologically significant time gap like the one that occurred between 1981 and 1986. Based on these parameters, the following periodization of the "Great Aliyah" can be proposed.

The first subcategory can be defined as the "classical" late-Soviet and early post-Soviet "Aliyah of the 1990s," which began in late 1989 and concluded by 1997–1998, bringing more than 750,000 new citizens to Israel.

The next subgroup comprised "Russian-speaking" immigrants who arrived in Israel between late 1998 and 2000—some 120,000 people, mostly pushed out of the CIS by the default and economic crisis. In terms of their value orientations, they already differed significantly from the "Aliyah of the 1990s." Tellingly, the proportion of immigrants from these years who returned or moved to third countries in 2002–2004, once the consequences of the financial crisis subsided, was twice as high as the average emigration rate for the community.

In 2002, a sharp decline in Aliyah began (18,914 people compared to 33,775 in 2001), triggered by the Second Intifada and the economic recession. The subsequent period saw record-low numbers of immigrants, reaching an absolute historical low by 2008. In our view, this "Aliyah of the 2000s" (72,000 people) should also be treated as a distinct socio-cultural group, dominated by individuals from the geographical, economic, and cultural periphery of the CIS and Baltic states. Their relocation was primarily motivated by family ties, personal reasons, and economic factors. Within the youth cohort, a distinct group emerged for the first time whose identity had been shaped within the system of revived Jewish education and Zionist-oriented community projects.

Between 2009 and 2013, a renewed increase in Russian-speaking Aliyah began, with 7,100 to 7,500 people arriving annually (compared to 5,800 in 2008). In a socio-cultural sense, this group was a continuation of the "Aliyah of the 2000s"—essentially the first fully post-Soviet generation of immigrants from the CIS and Baltic states. The increase in repatriation during these years was likely driven by those who had previously been hesitant but resolved their doubts in light of Israel's robust economic growth. This occurred against a backdrop of financial instability and uncertain economic prospects in Europe and the US, alongside the first signs of stagnation in the Russian economy, which had driven growth in the 2000s and influenced other CIS countries.

Finally, in 2014, a new surge in Aliyah began, which continues to this day. In 2014 and 2015, growth rates increased by 1.5 and 2 times, respectively, compared to 2013. Overall, as of June 1, 2020, more than 108,000 post-Soviet Jews arrived in Israel over these six and a half years (with just over half originating from Russia and more than a third from Ukraine). Clearly, the primary driver of this growth was the "push" factors resulting from the financial-economic crisis and the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, which severely impacted the economic situation and socio-political climate in both countries.

It is the first of these categories—the "classical" "Aliyah of the 1990s," which, excluding those deceased or permanently residing abroad, currently numbers approximately 550,000 people—that must be considered the core of Israel's "Russian-speaking community," defining its boundaries, structure, and status.

Following the pattern of previous Aliyah waves, the immigrants of the 1990s (as well as those of the 2000s) could theoretically have integrated into one of the two major segments of Israeli society: either the "First ('Ashkenazi') Israel," or, given the presence of "Russian Sephardim" among them (immigrants from Central Asian and Caucasian Jewish communities), the so-called "Second Israel," which includes Jews from Asian and African countries and their descendants. However, the representatives of the "Great Russian-speaking Aliyah" arrived in Israel at a moment when postmodern Israeli society had practically abandoned the "melting pot" ideology that dominated until the early 1980s in favor of multiculturalism. Its final establishment coincided precisely with mass immigration from the USSR/CIS in the early 1990s, allowing the Russian-speaking Aliyah to carve out its own distinct niche within the socio-cultural and ideological-political structure of the local Jewish collective.

The question of which niche this is remains open. In recent years, experts have increasingly referred to social strata informally known as the "Third Israel," which, in their view, do not fit into the traditional (or "historical") ideological and socio-cultural divisions of Israeli society. This term is most frequently used by "new" Israeli sociologists, who propose classifying "immigrants from Eastern countries, ultra-Orthodox Jews, and economically disadvantaged Russians" as part of the "Third Israel"[17]. For our part, we believe it is more accurate to use this term to describe groups that are "Neo-Zionist" in their ideology and associated with sectors that are loosely controlled by the "post-socialist" establishment of the "First Israel": non-monopolized sectors of the post-industrial economy (such as high-tech), alternative media, the open education system, the new generation of the settlement movement, and so forth. These are social sectors in which Russian-speaking Israelis—who, as recent studies show, are fully integrated into virtually all of the country's public systems[18]—are disproportionately represented, effectively forming the core of many segments.

As for the prior wave of Russian-speaking immigrants from 1969 to 1988, many of these socially and economically well-integrated individuals do not label themselves as "Russian," yet under certain conditions, they view themselves as part of the Russian-speaking community and hold a positive view of its communal structures. Furthermore, research indicates that the arrival of a million Russian-speaking immigrants, and the cultural environment they established, became a catalyst for a kind of "reverse Russification" of a portion of the long-established Russian-speaking population, including the revival of cultural, behavioral, and consumer habits[19]. Consequently, a significant portion of the 140,000 "generation of the seventies" living in Israel at the start of the "Great Aliyah" (and, by our estimates, more than half of the 48,000 representatives of this group currently living in Israel) consider themselves part of the Russian-speaking community. Moreover, they became an important source for the formation of "Russian" political and other communal elites.

Thus, while prior to the establishment of the State of Israel and during the first decades of its history, "Russian" origin was identified with the mainstream of Israeli society, the Russian-speaking immigrants of the 1990s, and partially those of 1969–1989, emerged as a group possessing its own cultural baggage, significantly different value-political orientations, and autonomous interests. This holds true despite significant cultural, social, and political differences and ideological conflicts within the group, both imported from their countries of origin and developed in Israel[20]. This category of "Russian" Jews can be defined as an internally contradictory yet bounded cultural-political entity, simultaneously integrated into and distinct from the host society.

The Russian-Speaking Community and "Russian-Jewish Subculture" in Israel: Parameters of Formation

Clearly, the formation of such a community became possible due to the willingness of Israelis to accept this phenomenon within the framework of "multiculturalism" (רב-תרבותיות) as a natural stage in the evolution of the local Jewish collective. The ultimate institutionalization of this concept coincided with the mass Aliyah from the USSR/CIS in the early 1990s and significantly legitimized the institutions of the "Russian-Jewish-Israeli" community, including a relatively relaxed attitude of society and its establishment toward the emergence of a "Russian" immigrant subculture, the material dimensions of which have been thoroughly documented by researchers[21].

In addition to the unprecedented demographic growth of Russian-speaking Israelis noted above, a crucial factor in the formation of this subculture was and remains the concentration of a significant portion of new immigrants in a few select cities. In the early 1990s, the Israeli government made extensive efforts to direct the "Great Aliyah" to development towns to bolster the country's social and geographical periphery (which was partially successful). Nonetheless, by the late 1990s, approximately 60% of immigrants from the USSR of the "Great Aliyah" era resided in 14 Israeli cities with populations of 100,000 or more. On the other hand, the largest cities—Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa, Petah Tikva, and Rishon LeZion—served as transit points for many of the immigrants of the first wave (1989–1997) who initially settled there. Within a few years, many opted for more affordable or comfortable housing in Beer Sheva, satellite towns of coastal metropolises, or their wider peripheries (Ashdod, Ashkelon, Nof HaGalil, etc.), as well as in localities of the so-called "inner periphery" (Ramla, Lod, Beit Shemesh, etc.) or settlements in Judea and Samaria. The natural consequence of this was a "cultural self-sufficiency" effect and a high concentration of new immigrants in these areas.

Tellingly, the 30 cities where Russian-speaking immigrants constitute more than one-fifth of the population—with the exception of 3 or 4 examples (such as Ashdod, which rivals Haifa for the status of the "Russian capital of Israel," or Beer Sheva)—are not among the country's largest urban centers. It was in these three dozen cities, and particularly in neighborhoods with a high concentration of immigrants from the former USSR[22], that the institutional component of Israel's "Russian" immigrant subculture primarily developed. This involved creating psychologically comfortable conditions for preserving and reproducing familiar social, cultural, and consumer behaviors, and establishing community-building social networks. It is no coincidence that more than half of the 1990s immigrants surveyed in 2017 by the PORI Institute reported that the vast majority of their close friends and acquaintances belonged to the Russian-speaking community. (Less than 40% chose the option "I socialize and make friends with various people, regardless of origin"; native Israelis and immigrants from other countries were identified as such by less than 10% of respondents).

The role of the "1990s Aliyah" must also be noted in preserving the Russian language as a living, legitimate means of intra-community communication and in forming its "Israeli variant"[23], alongside the engagement of Israelis of Soviet origin in the Russian-language media space. Significantly, large-scale representative surveys of the "Russian street," including the 1990s immigrants, conducted between 2009 and 2017 using our methodology, did not reveal a link between this engagement and the respondents' level of integration into Israeli society, their ethnic identity, or their length of residence in the country. The momentum generated during those years also affected the second and particularly the "one-and-a-half" generation of Russian-speaking families, for whom, according to Marina Niznik, a researcher of the Russian language in Israel, Russian is no longer the primary language of communication but rather "a heritage language"[24]. Remarkably, between 60% and 80% of representatives of these generations surveyed by us in 2017 stated that all or more than half of their close friends were from the former USSR or born to Russian-speaking families in Israel.

A special role in the development of the "Russian-Jewish subculture" in Israel and the formation of a Russian-Israeli identity is played by various "material" symbols that have become factors of positive alignment with the community and legitimize its claims to a "fair" share of power and public resources; most of these emerged in the 1990s and largely retain their structure-building role today.

Thus, at the very beginning of the 1990s, prominent cultural projects were launched on the initiative of activists from the two waves of "Russian" Aliyah. Among them were the now-famous Gesher Theater, the unique Mofet network of physics and mathematics schools for gifted children, the "Israeli Lyceum," and other similar "Russian" initiatives designed to fill the elite education niche left vacant in the "post-socialist" Israeli educational system[25]. Key socio-cultural symbols for the community also include holidays originally celebrated mainly by immigrants from the USSR/CIS, which gained national recognition within the climate of cultural pluralism established in Israel in the 1990s. (Chief among these are Victory Day over Nazism in World War II, celebrated on May 9, and the civil New Year—on the night of December 31 to January 1).

Socio-economic symbols played an even more significant role, one of which was the image of the "Aliyah of Academics" (individuals with higher education). Indeed, during the first 10 years of the Great Aliyah, many qualified specialists arrived in Israel, with their numbers in several sectors exceeding the local workforce several times over. Overall, out of 570,000 immigrants of that period aged over 25, more than 260,000 had graduated from universities, colleges, and technical schools. These included over 40,000 medical professionals, nearly 50,000 education workers, over 120,000 engineers and technicians, and more than 11,000 scientists.

According to numerous assessments, the integration of immigrant doctors into the healthcare system allowed Israel to defer for 20 years the need to open new medical faculties, a pressing issue since the late 1980s; educators and cultural figures significantly bolstered the social and humanitarian infrastructure, particularly in the periphery. The commercialization of numerous high-tech military technologies in the 1990s, combined with the arrival of tens of thousands of highly qualified specialists with both professional and fundamental academic education, fueled the rise of the Israeli high-tech industry. Consequently, the "post-industrial revolution" of the late 1990s and early 2000s, rapid GDP growth, and Israel's transformation into a global hub for advanced technology are clearly linked in the minds of most Israelis with the influence of the Russian-speaking community[26].

It is worth noting that this unique potential was realized largely due to the agency of the immigrants themselves. This agency was stimulated by the government policy of "direct absorption," which differed from the prior practice of direct state intervention in resolving the housing, professional, and cultural integration issues of immigrants. The new policy assumed their almost immediate entry into the free housing and labor markets, accompanied by a "basket" of financial and integration services that the immigrant could utilize at their discretion. Experiments in the spirit of direct absorption had been conducted in the late 1980s, but the decision for its large-scale implementation was made with the onset of the "Great Aliyah" from the USSR[27].

The reliance on the "internal" intellectual, economic, and social resources of the immigrants proved correct. Belonging to sectors of Soviet society where professional achievement possessed intrinsic value and was essentially part of their collective identity, the majority of immigrants in Israel refused to accept the loss of their hard-won status[28]. Unsurprisingly, voluntary professional associations of former Soviet citizens began to form as early as the beginning of the 1990s, ahead of almost all other "Russian" structures. In essence, the struggle for the recognition of qualifications and educational status became the first mass public protest movement of the "Aliyah of the 1990s," with the Russian-language Israeli media, then in its golden age, serving as its platform.

Clearly, the professional commitment of these immigrants became an additional factor of pressure on the country's leadership, which had to choose between two approaches: a purely "charitable" one—absorption as welfare support for vulnerable groups—or integrating professional absorption programs into the broader context of new socio-economic opportunities for Israeli society. The government chose the second option. By the early 1990s, the government optimized the system for recognizing the diplomas and qualifications of new immigrants. Concurrently, large-scale investment was directed into programs integrating immigrant teachers, doctors, cultural figures, scientists, and engineers into industry, academia, and the social sphere. Historically, projects such as the BASHAN system for integrating engineers, "technological incubators," the Defense Projects Fund, Science and Technology Centers, and the "Shapira," "Giladi," and KAMEA scientist absorption programs proved exceptionally significant.

Another consequence of introducing market-driven integration methods was the emergence in the 1990s of an impressive "self-help" structure—institutions and social networks in culture, education, professional orientation, and welfare, alongside a "Russian" business sector. This sector encompassed hundreds of grocery and book shops, "Russian" restaurants and cafes, medical and legal practices, construction and consulting firms, clubs, courses, interest groups, kindergartens, advertising and travel agencies, and so on[29]. A successful example of these trends in the educational sphere is the Association of Immigrant Teachers, founded in 1990 for the professional absorption of teachers, the integration of Russian-speaking pupils into the Israeli education system, and the modernization of components that immigrant teachers felt were underdeveloped. By the early 1990s, educational and counseling centers operated in nearly 40 cities across the country, where some 5,000 pupils were taught using "supplementary enrichment education" methods developed by former Soviet educators from the 1990s Aliyah. Overall, the creation of an alternative education system that absorbed thousands of teachers and methodologists—functioning as a community institution but not being, despite the use of the Russian language and Russian pedagogical principles, in a strict sense "Russian"—stands as a major achievement of the immigrant community from the USSR/CIS.

In turn, self-help structures were only one cluster of the institutional, social, and economic infrastructure of the "Russian community" in Israel, which took shape under the influence of three main factors. First, organizations and projects initiated by the Israeli establishment (government bodies, the Jewish Agency, trade unions, national parties, etc.) for the social, economic, cultural, and political absorption of new immigrants. Second, the immigrant-led cultural, social, and political initiatives themselves. And finally, structures initiated and/or supported by the Jewish diaspora and foreign organizations. While the first factor was dominant in the 1970s, by the 1990s, alongside the support of "official" structures (the Ministry of Absorption and other ministries, the Jewish Agency, municipalities, etc.), immigrant-initiated projects began playing an increasingly prominent role. Although a significant portion of these organizations' budgets came from funds allocated by state and quasi-state institutions, the immigrant associations already functioned as civil society institutions.

All of these factors led to the emergence in Israel, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, of a diverse array of Russian-Jewish initiatives: various clubs, voluntary societies, educational institutions, theater groups, veteran and youth unions, professional and creative associations (of teachers, engineers, scientists, writers, filmmakers, etc.). In addition, print publications, social aid structures, and "Russian" business organizations operated. In 1996–1997 alone, some 300 associations of new immigrants from the USSR/CIS were officially active in education, culture, and social assistance[30]. Serving as an essential part of the extensive system of community-building social networks that emerged in those years, they functioned as a "social compensator" for the negative aspects of the otherwise successful "direct absorption" policy.

Thus, the largely spontaneous formation of Israel's "Russian" community, which began with the onset of the "Great Aliyah" of the 1990s, was substantially complete by the end of that decade. The contours of this community are defined by leadership groups represented in all spheres of the country's social, political, and economic life; numerous institutions providing specific services and reproducing communal identification; and an extensive network of formal and informal relationships.

In Search of a "Russian Lobby"

Consistent with the Israeli model of state-society relations, the political mobilization of immigrant associations and the emergence of political movements and parties representing former Soviet citizens quickly followed. This was particularly driven by the fact that the immigrants of the final decade of the 20th century became a powerful political-demographic force, bolstering the demands of the Russian-Jewish elites of the 1970s–1990s for fair representation in shaping Israel's national priorities and a "more equitable" distribution of public resources[31].

Tellingly, the formation of the socio-political structures of "Russian Israel" proceeded in parallel with, and using the same models as, the umbrella organizations of the Jewish movement in the Perestroika-era USSR. Thus, in 1986, the Soviet Jewry Information Center in Israel and the Information Center on Repatriation issues in the USSR (from 1987—the Information Center on Repatriation and Jewish Culture) were established almost simultaneously. In 1988, using the Israeli Information Center as a base, a group of prominent former dissidents and "Prisoners of Zion" founded the Zionist Forum of Soviet Jewry. The Forum's 105-member council included all the prominent figures of the Soviet Zionist "refusenik" and national human rights movement. Natan Sharansky, the most prominent and respected "Russian" public figure of the time, was elected chairman.

As the volume of Aliyah expanded, the Forum gradually shifted from supporting veterans of the Zionist movement to broader activities aimed at integrating new arrivals, initiating a range of programs to address housing, employment, and counseling needs. During this same period, the Moscow-based Information Center on Repatriation and Jewish Culture, along with other Jewish organizations, played a leading role in the creation of the Vaad of Jewish Organizations and Communities of the USSR in December 1989. The organizational principles of the Vaad, in turn, served as a model for the 1992 transformation of the Zionist Forum into an umbrella structure representing over 40 voluntary immigrant organizations and tens of thousands of individual members.

The Forum's rival in representing immigrant interests was another umbrella structure—the Association of Immigrants from the USSR, which had emerged back in the 1970s under the auspices of the MAPAI/Labor party. Ultimately, the 1992 elections saw the participation of two parties—the center-right "Democracy and Aliyah" and the center-left TALI—created by activists from these two rival immigrant associations, which functioned as "Russian" satellites of Likud and the Labor Party (Avoda). Along with another list—the centrist Olim and Pensioners Party—it is evident that immigrants from the USSR split along the same ideological lines as Israeli society at large. However, in electoral terms, these initiatives, along with another "satellite" project—the "Tikva" party, created in 1999 by the campaign of Labor's prime ministerial candidate Ehud Barak—did not achieve success.

The emergence in 1995 of the "Yisrael Ba-Aliyah" (IBA) movement, subsequently a political party, and its success in the 1996 and 1999 elections—in contrast to similar experiments in 1977, 1981, and 1992—demonstrated that the Russian-speaking community was ready to occupy an independent political niche. IBA, whose leaders skillfully capitalized on the fractures in Israeli national politics and the self-organization drive of USSR immigrants, made a successful debut in the 1996 elections, winning 175,000 votes and seven parliamentary seats. Prominent former "Prisoners of Zion"—party leader Natan Sharansky and Central Committee chairman Yuli Edelstein—became Minister of Industry and Trade and Minister of Absorption, respectively, in Benjamin Netanyahu's 1996–1999 government. The 1998 municipal elections also brought many party representatives into key municipal and regional councils. IBA largely repeated its success in the 1999 elections, securing 172,000 votes, six seats in parliament, and two cabinet posts in Ehud Barak's government.

However, internal divisions within the community resurfaced: by the late 1990s, three "Russian" parties, fully or partially split from IBA, sat in parliament, reflecting the divisions within the "Aliyah of the 1990s" across the entire spectrum of political and socio-economic issues. Beside IBA itself—the "centrist party of socio-communal consensus"—the Knesset featured Avigdor Lieberman's "right-wing and free-market" "Yisrael Beiteinu" (Israel Our Home) party and Roman Bronfman's "left-wing and social" "Democratic Choice." However, by the next elections in 2003, Democratic Choice and Yisrael Beiteinu ran as part of national Israeli blocs aligned with their platforms—the far-left Meretz and the right-wing National Union, respectively. Meanwhile, IBA, which had initially aimed to monopolize the "Russian street," won only two seats in the 2003 elections and soon merged into the ruling center-right Likud, vanishing from the political landscape.

For many immigrants, this became an argument in favor of a third model: cooperation between organized Russian-speaking groups and major national movements. Attempts of this kind (largely unsuccessful) had been made since the 1990s. Shortly after the Labor Party's (Avoda) sweeping victory in the 1992 elections, achieved in part due to the support of immigrants from the USSR/CIS, the idea of creating a powerful "Russian" internal party organization emerged. However, it quickly became clear that Russian-speaking immigrants had not gained real influence within the party. Consequently, Avoda's "Russian" wing shrank from 18,000 members in 1995 to about 6,000 in 1999, and to 2,500 by late 2001. Subsequent attempts in later years to revive this project proved ineffective.

Likud, Labor's historical center-right rival, also attempted to appeal to the "Russian Israel" electorate; out of its 170,000 members in the mid-1990s, approximately 27,000 were Russian-speaking immigrants. This occurred against the backdrop of massive support that former Soviet immigrants gave Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996, in the country's first-ever direct elections for prime minister. However, this "honeymoon" between the post-Soviet Aliyah and Likud was short-lived. Immigrants, disillusioned by the leadership's shift to the left in 1997–1999 and its perceived lack of interest in Russian-speaking activists, left the movement in large numbers, contributing significantly to its defeat in the 1999 elections. Many followed A. Lieberman into his newly founded "Yisrael Beiteinu" party in early 1999. The Likud leadership had to rebuild relations with the "1990s Aliyah" in the following decade, which it did with some success.

Two other attempts to court Russian-speaking voters were made by the Shinui ("Change") party, whose moderate-centrist, liberal-market, and anti-clerical platform attracted a segment of the electorate in 1999 and 2003, and the socio-populist Sephardic-traditionalist Shas movement, supported by a portion of Bukharan, Georgian, and Caucasian Jews. However, these "Russian" projects also quickly faded away.

Thus, the political impact of the "Great Aliyah" in the 1990s was mixed. On one hand, Russian Israelis, unlike Jews from Asia and Africa, did not succeed in creating highly robust political lobbying institutions of their own. This resulted, at the turn of the century, in a disproportionately low representation of the "1990s Aliyah" at almost all levels of government and limited influence on political decision-making processes[32].

On the other hand, Russian-speaking Jews recognized their political power and electoral demand, gaining a distinct status in the eyes of Israeli society and the establishment. In doing so, they brought a new generation of "Russian" political elites into the country's political arena. After sectoral movements faded following their peak influence in 1999, these elites offered immigrants new models of political institutionalization. Statistics show that the vast majority of former Soviet citizens have since preferred either a "Russian party with a national agenda" or a "national party with a strong Russian wing." In the first category, the rising star of "Russian" politics, "Yisrael Beiteinu," held almost exclusive dominance, while in the second, Likud was the main choice, occasionally challenged for this niche by other right-wing and centrist projects.

A Decade of "Collective Israelization"

The political transformation of the "Russian street" was just one manifestation of the integration of immigrants from the USSR and CIS into Israeli society and their adoption of its values, a process that was well advanced by the late 1990s, as studies from that era showed[33]. It was during that decade that the basic model of ethno-national identification for these immigrants was established, defined as "Russian Jews in Israel." This gave rise to their self-perception as a distinct socio-cultural group within the Israeli Jewish collective[34]. This phenomenon, as evidenced by numerous studies over the years, including five large-scale surveys of the Israeli "Russian street" between 2009 and 2017[35], has demonstrated stability over the subsequent two decades. This identity, as our study showed, is characteristic not only of ethnic or "Halakhic" Jews but also of immigrants not recognized as Jews in Israel[36].

Among the primary parameters of this identity model (which also proved attractive to the Russian-speaking Aliyah of the new century), the following should be highlighted. First, the formation of a distinct "Russian-Jewish" type of stable Israeli civic identity. For instance, between 75% and 80% of immigrants from 1989 to 2000 surveyed in September 2013 and March 2014 expressed a stable Israeli identity. Identification with Israel was stronger the longer respondents had lived in the country, and more robust the younger they were at the time of immigration and the survey, the better their command of Hebrew, and the more active their personal ties with local society. Our most recent study (March 2017) reflected a similar picture: nearly 70% of Russian-speaking immigrants of those years consider themselves Israeli "to a great extent" or "only Israeli." Slightly over a quarter stated they felt Israeli "to some extent," and less than 5% reported lacking an Israeli identity or found it difficult to answer. This reinforces the conclusion of researchers who believe that immigrants from the former USSR largely belong to those groups of Israeli society that constitute its Zionist majority[37].

Let us turn to the second parameter characterizing this identity model: the parallel use of three interaction models by Russian-speaking Israelis with the host community: "assimilation" (complete absorption into the Israeli Jewish socio-cultural environment), "integration without acculturation" (integration into the Israeli environment and adoption of local values while retaining a Russian-Jewish identity), and "isolation" (the formation of "Russian" cultural islands on the margins of local society). While in the final decade of the last century, the proportion of community factions adhering to each of these models was estimated at approximately 30:50:20, in the subsequent period, the boundaries shifted significantly to a new ratio of 50:33:12[38].

The third element was the re-evaluation by Soviet immigrants of the 1990s of their previous cultural and identity concepts under the influence of norms and standards accepted in Israel. A case in point is their attitude toward religion and its role in the country's public life, which clearly adapted to the realities of a "Jewish and democratic state." Research showed that the classical Soviet-era opposition between "atheists" and "believers," which relegated the religious factor to the margins of ethno-national self-determination, underwent a major transformation in Israel and stabilized at the turn of the century. Since then, some 5% to 7% of immigrants from the former USSR define themselves as "strictly religious," of whom about one-third are ultra-Orthodox and two-thirds are religious Zionists. Another 17% to 25% are "traditionalists," who combine a largely secular lifestyle with varying degrees of observing religious commandments. Only 10% to 12% consider themselves "committed (anti-religious) atheists." The majority of "Russian" Israelis (roughly 50% to 60%) classify themselves under the category of "Hilonim" (secular), which is also the largest group among native Israelis—secular citizens who have no objection to religion per se and occasionally participate in lifecycle religious (or national-cultural, though religious in origin) rituals.

The fourth element is the ongoing identification of the majority of 1990s olim, and those who arrived in the subsequent two decades, with the "Russian Israel" community. For instance, over 40% of respondents surveyed in 2017 believed that "such a community exists and will not disappear in the near future." A similar proportion was confident that this phenomenon exists at least among the first generation of immigrants. More importantly, over 70% of respondents reported feeling a personal connection to this community to some degree. While immigrants over 55 were more likely to report an "absolute" communal identity, respondents aged 25–54 were more likely to feel such an identification "depending on circumstances." This position is also shared by most representatives of the "one-and-a-half generation" of immigrants, as well as those who arrived in Israel aged 19–25. Only among immigrants aged 18–24 was a negative answer most common, though even in this group, 45% reported some form of identification with the Russian-speaking community.

Tellingly, the views of the 1990s immigrants on both questions closely aligned with the community's average. Furthermore, approximately 80% of this group consider it "important" or "very important" for their children and grandchildren to speak Russian and be familiar with the general and/or Jewish culture of their country of origin (a view shared by the majority of the "one-and-a-half generation," most of whom were brought to Israel as children in the 1990s). Around 70% continue to believe in the existence of specific issues affecting the "Russian street" in Israel, distinct from those of other population groups.

However, there is no basis for asserting that a first- or even "one-and-a-half" or second-generation "Russian ghetto" is forming. The desire to preserve and pass on the Russian language and Russian-Jewish culture exists in close symbiosis with the desire to be "true Israelis." The validation of "Russian" communal symbols, institutions, and values in Israel occurs by elevating them to national status. The formation of the ethno-communal identity and structures of the "Third (or 'Russian') Israel," centered around the 1990s immigrants, is developing within the context of "multiculturalism within the Jewish collective" and serves as an organic complement to this community's stable Israeli identity.

The emergence in the country of the largest sub-ethnic group after native Israelis, possessing its own cultural-mental baggage, system of social and economic values, and ideological concepts, presented a complex challenge for Israeli society. Consequently, in integrating these new arrivals and their descendants, Israel was forced to radically revise its own seemingly established system of social standards and cultural codes.

Historical experience demonstrates that this task was, on the whole, successfully accomplished, representing a collective achievement of Israeli society and the State of Israel.

[1] Baruch Kimmerling, The End of Ashkenazi Hegemony. Tel Aviv: Keter, 2005 (Hebrew)

[2] Data from the Israeli Ministry of Aliyah and Integration, January 2020.

[3] See Ro’i Y., The Struggle for Soviet Jewish Emigration, 1948–1967. L., 1991; Salitan L.P., Politics and Nationality in Contemporary Soviet-Jewish Emigration, 1968–89. N.Y., 1992; Soviet Jewry in the Decisive Decade, 1971–1980. Ed. by R.O. Freedman. Durham, Duke Univ. Press, 1984; Petrus Buwalda, They Did Not Dwell Alone. Jewish Emigration from the Soviet Union, 1967–1990. Wash., Baltimore and London: WWC Press and Johns Hopkins Univ Press, 1997

[4] Gilboa Y., The Black Years of Soviet Jewry. Boston, Little Brown, 1972

[5] See: Zvi Gitelman, A Century of Ambivalence. N.Y.: Schocken Books, 1988; Benjamin Pinkus, The Jews of the Soviet Union. The History of a National Minority. Cambridge: University Press, 1988; Yaacov Ro’i, The Struggle for Soviet Jewish Emigration, 1948–1967. London, 1991

[6] For details, see Velvl Chernin, “Institutionalization of Jewish Culture in the USSR, 1960s–1980s”. Jews and Jewish Life in Russia and the Soviet Union. Ed. by Y. Ro’i. London, Frank Cass, 1995, p. 226-236

[7] See Ya’acov Ro’i, “The Jewish Religion in the Soviet Union after World War II”. Jews and Jewish Life in Russia and the Soviet Union. Ed. by Y. Ro’i. London, Frank Cass, 1995, p. 263-89 and Vladimir Khanin, “Judaism and Organized Jewish Movement in the USSR/CIS After World War II: the Ukrainian Case”. Jewish Political Studies Review, Vol. 11, No 1-2 (Spring 1999), p. 75-100. See also Semyon Charny’s dissertation "State Policy toward Jewish Religious Communities during the 'Thaw': 1953–1964" (Moscow, RSUH, 2007)

[8] The academic literature on this topic is extensive. Key classic works include: Ro’i Y., The Struggle for Soviet Jewish Emigration, 1948–1967. L, 1991; Salitan L.P., Politics and Nationality in Contemporary Soviet-Jewish Emigration, 1968–89. N.Y., 1992; Soviet Jewry in the Decisive Decade, 1971–1980. Ed. by R. O. Freedman. Durham, Duke Univ. Press, 1984; Drachman E. Challenging the Kremlin: The Soviet Jewish Movement for Freedom. N.Y., Paragon House, 1991; Petrus Buwalda, They Did Not Dwell Alone. Jewish Emigration from the Soviet Union, 1967–1990. Wash., Baltimore and London: WWC Press and Johns Hopkins Univ Press, 1997. See also: Khanin V. and Morozov B. "The Six-Day War and the Emergence of the Jewish National Movement in the USSR: Historical and Sociological Aspects." The Six-Day War and the Jewish Movement in the USSR: Essays in Social History. Ed. by Khanin V., "Sefer" (Academic Series), 2008, p. 19-42

[9] Almanac "Jews of the USSR in Israel and the Diaspora". Ed. by L. Dymerskaya-Tsigelman, issue 20-21, (2002), p. 96 (in Hebrew)

[10] Central State Archive of Public Organizations of Ukraine (TsDAGOU), fund 1, inventory 25, file 2105, l. 1

[11] Mark Tolts, “A Half Century of Jewish Emigration from the Former Soviet Union”. Paper prepared for the Symposium in Honor of Dr. Mark Tolts on His Retirement. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 27 June 2019

[12] Ze’ev (Vladimir) Khanin, “The Jewish Right of Return: Reflections on the Mass Immigration to Israel from the Former Soviet Union”, in Lustick, Ian and Lesch, Ann (eds.), Exile and Return: Predicaments of Palestinian Arabs and Jews. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, p. 183-203; Belenkaya L. and Zinger B. In Defiance: The Jewish National Movement in the USSR and its Ideology. — Minsk: Met, 2004, p. 155-171

[13] Nudelman, R. "An Attempt to Renew Zionism: Between the Aliyah of the 1970s and the Aliyah of the 1990s". Jews of the USSR at the Crossroads, No. 4 (19), 2000, p. 67-84 [in Hebrew]

[14] Izvestia, June 6, 1991

[15] Discussion materials at the congress were partially published in the samizdat journal Shofar (Chernivtsi) 1990, No. 1, p. 7-8. See also: Khanin V., "Roots and Legacy of the All-Union Vaad", EAJ Policy Papers, No 29 (20.12.2019) https://institute.eajc.org/eajpp-29/; Baruch Gur-Gurevitz, Open Gates. The Inside Story of Mass Aliya from the Soviet Union and its Successor States. Jerusalem: The Bialik Institute, 1996, p. 52-62

[16] Here and below (unless specified otherwise) — data from the Central Bureau of Statistics and the Ministry of Aliyah and Integration of Israel

[17] See, for example: Yehouda Shenhav, Beyond the Two-State Solution: A Jewish Political Essay. New York: Polity Press, 2012, p. 106-115

[18] See, for example: Khanin V., Epstein A. and Niznik M., Undoubtedly Israelis: Russian-speaking Jews "at home" and "abroad" — identity and culture. — Jerusalem and Ramat Gan: Ministry of Aliyah and Absorption and Bar-Ilan University, 2011 (in Hebrew); Old Roots in New Soil: Adaptation of Immigrants from the Former USSR in Israel in the New Millennium. Ed. by Sabina Lysitsa and Irit Bokek-Cohen. Ariel: Ariel University in Samaria, 2012 (in Hebrew)

[19] Eliezer Feldman, “Pragmatic Isolation» of the FSU Immigrants in Israel”. Paper, presented at the International Conference «Russian-Speaking Jewry in Global Perspective: Assimilation, Integration and Community-building», Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, 14-16 June 2004; Ya’kov V. Rabkin, “Cultures in Transition” in: Tamar Horowitz (ed.) The Soviet Man in an Open Society. Lanham, New York and London: University Press of America, 1989, p. 251-257

[20] Ze’ev (Vladimir) Khanin, “Russian-Jewish Ethnicity: Israel and Russia Compared” in Ben-Rafael, E., Gorny, Y., and Ro’i, Y. (eds.), Contemporary Jewries: Convergence and Divergence. Leiden and Boston: Brill Academic Publishers, 2003, p. 216-234

[21] See, for example: Eliezer Feldman, "Russian" Israel: Between Two Poles. — M.: Market DS, 2003, p. 125-155, 351-415; Eliezer Ben-Rafael, Mikhail Lyubansky, Olaf Glöckner, Paul Harris, Yael Israel, Willi Jasper, and Julius Schoeps, Building a Diaspora: Russian Jews in Israel, Germany, and the USA (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2006), p. 55-78, 119-139; Khanin V., "The Third Israel": Formation of the Community of Immigrants from the USSR/CIS and its Role in the Country's Political Structure at the Turn of the 20th and 21st Centuries. — M.: Institute of the Middle East, 2014

[22] Thus, about a quarter of immigrants from the former USSR surveyed in 2011 during a joint study by the Ministry of Absorption of Israel and Ariel University stated that their "fellow countrymen" constitute the majority or vast majority of residents in their area. Another quarter claimed that they made up about half. Less than one-fifth of respondents stated that "Russian" residents in their area were very few or none at all. Significant age differences among members of these categories of respondents were not recorded. (Elazar Leshem with the participation of Vladimir (Ze'ev) Khanin, "Civic Identity of Immigrants from the Former USSR 1990–2010", sociological report submitted to the Ministry of Absorption of Israel, Jerusalem, March 2020), in Hebrew

[23] Niznik M., "Features of Cultural Integration of Immigrants from the USSR/CIS in Israel". Diaspora, 2003, No. 1, p. 49-60

[24] Marina Niznik, “Russian Language in Israel — Is it Half Alive or Half Dead?”. Paper, presented to the “National Challenge — the Third Ashdod Conference on Aliya and Absorption”, Ashdod, January 2010, p. 6

[25] Alek D. Epstein and Nina G. Kheimets, “Cultural Clash and Educational Diversity: Immigrant Teachers Efforts to Rescue the Education of Immigrants Children in Israel”, International Journal of Sociology of Education, Vol. 10, No 2, 2000

[26] A detailed analysis of this phenomenon is contained in our study: Vladimir (Ze’ev) Khanin, “Aliyah from the Former Soviet Union: Contribution to the National Security Balance”. Position paper, presented on behalf of the Israeli Ministry of Immigrant Absorption to the 10th Annual Herzliya Conference “Israel’s National Security Balance”, IDC Herzliya, 31 January — 3 December 2010. See also Dmitry Maryasis. Experience of Building an Innovation Economy. The Case of Israel. Moscow: IV RAN, 2015, p. 77-88

[27] See Damian N. and Rosenbaum-Tamari Y., "Long-term Monitoring of the Integration of Immigrants from the former USSR in Israel within the Direct Absorption Program of Aliyah". Research Report, Jerusalem. Ministry of Aliyah and Absorption, 2006 (in Hebrew)

[28] Judith Shuval, “The Dynamics of Professional Commitment: Immigrant Physicians from the Former Soviet Union in Israel” in Elazar Leshem and Judith Shuval, Eds. Immigration to Israel: Sociological Perspective (New Brunswick and London, 1998), p. 139-142

[29] Sarit Cohen-Goldner and M. Daniele Paserman, The Dynamic Impact of Immigration on Natives’ Labor Market Outcomes: Evidence from Israel, London: CEPR, 2005

[30] Leshem E. and Lissak M., "Formation of the 'Russian' Community in Israel". Jews of the USSR at the Crossroads, 2000, No. 4 (19), p. 48 (in Hebrew)

[31] For more details on the political institutionalization of the "Russian street" in Israel in the 1990s and 2000s, see Vladimir Khanin, “Israel’s ‘Russian’ Parties” in Robert O. Freedman, Contemporary Israel: Domestic Politics, Foreign Policy, and Security Challenges. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 2008, p. 97-114; Khanin V., "Russians" and Power in Modern Israel. — M.: Inst. of the Middle East, 2003

[32] For details, see Vladimir (Ze’ev) Khanin, “The Israeli ‘Russian’ Community and Immigrants Party Politics in the 2003 Elections”, Israel Affairs, Vol. 10, No 1-2 (Summer 2004), p. 146-180

[33] Peres Y. and Lissitsa S., "Jews of the USSR in Israel — Identity Formation and Integration Processes", Sotsiologia Yisraelit [Israeli Sociology]. Vol. 3, No. 1, 2000, p. 7-30 (in Hebrew); Moshe Lissak and Elazar Leshem (eds.), From Russia to Israel: Identity and Culture. Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad — kav adom, 2011 (in Hebrew)

[34] Khanin V., "Israelis, but in Their Own Way" // Khanin V., Niznik M., Epstein A., Undoubtedly Israelis: Russian-speaking Jews "at home" and "abroad" — identity and culture. Ramat Gan: Program for the Study of Contemporary Jewry, Bar-Ilan Univ., 2011, p. 13-46 (in Hebrew)

[35] The studies were conducted on a representative quota sample (over 1000 respondents in each) by the sociological agency "Mutagim" in March 2009, and the PORI Institute in August-September 2013, March 2014, December 2014–January 2015, and March 2017, under a program proposed by the author of this article.

[36] Khanin V., Joining the Jewish Collective: Formalizing the Jewish Status of Repatriates from the Former USSR of non-Jewish and Mixed Origin in Israel (Jerusalem: The Morasha Institute, 2014)

[37] Vladimir (Ze’ev) Khanin, “The Jewish Right of Return: Reflections on the Mass Immigration to Israel from the Former Soviet Union”, in Lustick, Ian and Lesch, Ann (eds.), Exile and Return: Predicaments of Palestinian Arabs and Jews. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005, p. 185-191

[38] See Khanin V. and Epstein A., "Cultural Continuity, Modernization, and Immigration: Russian-Jewish Identity in Israel and the Diaspora". Contemporary Society — the Israeli Model. Collection of articles in honor of Prof. Moshe Lissak. Edited by Ephraim Yaar, Eliezer Ben-Rafael, Avi Bareli, and Uri Cohen. — Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and Beer Sheva: The Chaim Weizmann Institute for the Study of Zionism, p. 505-520 (in Hebrew)