July 14, 2005
Around 1,700 French Jews have already moved to Israel in the first seven months of this year, according to an estimate by the Jewish Agency for Israel (JAFI) in France. This represents a 40 per cent increase compared to the same period last year. In 2004, a total of 2,415 French Jews emigrated to Israel, JAFI director David Roche told AFP, adding that the Agency hoped that 3,000 Jews would make the move this year. The strong rise in the number of anti-Semitic acts in France has been troubling the country's Jewish community, which is the largest in Europe and has about 600,000 members. But Roche said the increase in the numbers of emigrants to Israel was not a matter of "distress, but rather personal choice". JAFI put the number of French emigrants at 2,313 in 2003 and 2,566 in 2002. Since Israel was founded in 1948, about 76,000 French Jews have left their homeland to live in the Jewish state, Roche said. Meanwhile, it was also reported that in 2006 Israel will, for the first time, be home to the largest Jewish population in the world, surpassing the United States. According to the Jewish People Policy Planning Institute, 5.3 million Jews will live in Israel next year, a few thousand more than in the USA.
