The Institute for Euro-Asian Jewish Studies (IEAJS), a project of the Euro-Asian Jewish Congress (EAJC), has launched a new initiative focused on the study of recent emigration from the former USSR and the evolving transnational post-Soviet Jewish diaspora. The project was officially launched in February 2025 with the support of IEAJS Academic Director Prof. Zeev Khanin and the Institute’s Executive Vice President and EAJC Director General, Dr. Haim Ben Yakov.

This new initiative, led by recent “ole hadash” Prof. Evgeny Smirnov and academically overseen by Dr. Mikhail Men, aims to conduct comparative academic and applied research into Jewish and other communities of repatriates and emigrants from the post-Soviet space, both in Israel and in the wider diaspora.

In the few months since the project’s inception, several public-academic events have taken place under its auspices. These include the presentation of initial findings at a roundtable in Ashdod, organized by sociologist Dr. Elina Bardach-Yalov, which focused on the integration experiences of the “military aliyah” wave of 2022–2025. Additionally, multiple studies have been launched.

One of these studies explores the identity, motivations, and future prospects of repatriates from the former USSR who arrived over the past decade.

Another study addresses a relatively new phenomenon: “Russian-speaking” Jews-mostly repatriates from the former USSR in various waves—who now reside, to varying degrees of permanence, on the island of Cyprus near Israel. Future phases of the project will focus on mapping and analyzing emerging Jewish emigrant communities in Central and Eastern European countries.