The Israeli government has decided to set up a special body to increase immigration from former Soviet Union countries and to strengthen Jewish identity there. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told his weekly cabinet meeting that Jewish community in that region could disappear in a generation unless assimilation was curbed. In the special cabinet discussion, a representative from Nativ - a once-covert agency founded in the Prime Minister's Office in the 1950s to bring Jews to Israel and to serve as a liaison for Jewish dissidents in the Soviet Union - told the ministers that there are some 880,000 people in its former territories who are eligible to immigrate to Israel under the Law of Return. More than half, the representative added, were not Jewish according to religious law.
The special government body created to address the problem will act as an inter-ministerial committee, jointly chaired by the Jewish Agency for Israel, the Ministry for Immigrant Absorption and Nativ. It will be headed by cabinet secretary Oved Yehezkel. The briefing on the state of the Jews in the former Soviet Union revealed that only 10 per cent of this population is involved in Jewish activity, with assimilation reaching 80 percent in some communities.
Nativ's director Naomi Ben Ami told the newspaper "Ha'aretz" that in light of these figures "the Jewish Diaspora is going to lose this region's Jewry in one generation." Additionally, the Cabinet was told that some 38,000 Jews who came to Israel during the years 1989 and 2007 have returned to their countries of origin. Some 70 per cent of the people eligible to emmigrate from the former Soviet Union are older than 45, while 36 per cent of them are of retirement age.
