In Israel, All Is Not Milk and Honey : A Heavy Influx of Soviet Immigrants Causing Problems

In a spare, fourth-floor walk-up apartment near Jerusalem’s central bus station, the Shkolniksons of Leningrad, two months in Israel and jobless, counted themselves among the fortunate.

They had left home and families to catch a swelling tide of Jewish emigrants leaving the Soviet Union, most of them uncertain how long the door would remain open.

“Now, under (Mikhail S.) Gorbachev, it’s bye-bye,” explained Efim Shkolnikson in tentative English, flipping his hand as if the Soviet president were shooing flies. “But things are not stable. No one knows. The old regime might return.”

Under the old regime--Leonid I. Brezhnev and his immediate successors--Jewish emigration was eventually choked to a trickle. In 1985, the year Gorbachev came to power, fewer than 1,000 Jews left the Soviet Union. Next year, according to Western estimates, as many as 100,000 will receive exit visas, and five times that many may eventually seek to emigrate.

People Mean Power

Israel wants them.

People mean power in the Israeli-Arab equation, politically and, in the long run, economically. Shkolnikson and his wife, Faina, both 27 and both graduate engineers, are prime immigrants--educated, dedicated and parents of a young family, two sons.

But wanting them is one thing, getting them another. Never in the past decade has Israel been able to claim anywhere near half the Soviet Jews who emigrate.

Last year, for instance, 22,000 left the Soviet Union, all with visas marking their destination as Israel. But only 2,250 came here as immigrants, “making aliya (going up),” as the Israelis call the commitment to the Jewish state. The rest became “dropouts” at a halfway camp outside Vienna. The vast majority has sought to enter the United States as political refugees, with a handful seeking homes in Canada, Australia or South Africa.

The American take has sometimes embittered immigration officials here.

“This (Israel) should be the destination for all Jews,” Gad Ben-Ari, a spokesman for the quasi-governmental Jewish Agency, said recently. “I believe I reflect the mainstream sentiment in Israel.”

Now, however, a change in U.S. policy toward Soviet refugees, who have faced few hurdles in past years, will fix an effective ceiling of 50,000 next year. Those turned back “can always go to Israel or return to Russia,” a State Department official observed tersely earlier this month. (The department later repudiated that comment.)

For years, the problem for Israel has been one of too few. Now, with a tide running, the immediate problems of too many arise as well. Already this year, Soviet immigration has increased by more than 200% here.

“As of now, there is no money in the treasury for the effective absorption of these immigrants,” Yitzhak Peretz, Israel’s immigration minister, admitted in an interview. Peretz estimates that 40,000 Soviet Jews will come to Israel next year. Other estimates range lower.

Whatever the number, Israeli officials figure they will need $3 billion to accommodate the newcomers, providing housing, jobs and social services. “The finance minister is planning to go to the United States and raise a billion dollars (from private sources),” Peretz noted. The rest would have to come from Israeli government funds.

And for Israel, not all the problems can be solved with money.

Job opportunities, for instance. Efim Shkolnikson, the refugee from Leningrad, is a mechanical engineer, and his professional credentials are equivalent to those of his Israeli peers. But he speaks little Hebrew or English, both expected of engineers here. So he is a student again, living in an apartment provided rent-free for one year by the Jewish Agency, the massive institution charged with promoting immigration.

When opportunities do arise, the newcomer said, “the employer looks first to his own group,” native-born Israelis. In the job-short Israeli economy, there is evident discrimination against immigrants. Ida Nudel, now living in Israel after a long struggle for human rights in the Soviet Union, put it this way in a press interview: “I think there is a crisis in the ideology Israel was built upon. Today, every newcomer is considered a nuisance. We should be considering them a blessing.”

For Shkolnikson, the bridge back has been burned. “My father is a former military man,” he explained. “He is very Soviet-minded. He doesn’t want to speak to me now. He’s not interested.”

Social problems for the newcomers range across the board. Said Shmuel Azarkh, a top official of the voluntary Soviet Jewry Zionist Forum:

“What we are doing, what we have to do, is building, creating, a Russian community in Israel. We are from the heart of Russia. People from Romania, the Baltic, places like that, they still had a community, but ours had been destroyed in this century.

“We had no Jewish culture, no language. The same Russian Jews went 100 years ago to the United States and built the strongest Jewish community in the world. . . . But the Soviet Jews arrive in Israel without these bonds.

“We come here as individuals, not as a community. The overriding idea was to leave the Soviet Union, not to go to some specific place.”

Not all of the newcomers are like Shkolnikson, who said there was never a doubt that he would come to Israel if he got a visa, pointing out that “there is a strong Zionist wave” in his native Leningrad. Many are more Soviet than Jewish, said Azarkh, a one-time art critic who left Moscow in 1981--”thrown out,” he specified.

The original idea for the Soviet Jews’ forum was to be advisory, an umbrella for community organizations. Its leadership includes the heroes and heroines of the refusenik movement: Nudel, Natan Sharansky, Yosef Begun and others. But, said Azarkh: “The problem with Soviets, Jewish or otherwise, is that they don’t take matters into their own hands. The thinking of citizens of a centralized state is, ‘Someone will decide for us.’ ”

So the forum has become a hands-on agency, running a job placement program and a dental clinic, counseling immigrants befuddled by the bureaucracy, and now developing a mortgage bank to help finance home purchases.

Despite the efforts of Israeli officials and groups like the forum, disincentives weigh strongly among prospective immigrants. Among them:

-- Financial opportunity. “Let’s face it,” Azarkh said. “They see the United States as a big, rich country, and Israel as a little, poor country.” But for those on their first trip, the relative riches of Israel can be awesome. “It’s a wonder,” remarked a big bear of a man from Baku among a group of Soviet tourists. “You can buy anything you want.”

Leah Slovin, head of the Russian department of the Jewish Agency, met with the tourists at a downtown hotel to answer their questions about life in Israel. “They ask a lot about the conditions of absorption,” she related, using the government jargon for founding a life in Israel. “Many in this group are physicians. They want to know whether they can take their exams in Russian. Others want to know if their children can transfer their school credits.

“We show them our country. We take them to our factories and our universities. We bring them to historical places. We don’t talk about aliya. “ The Soviets, Slovin pointed out, have developed a fine ear for propaganda, and any hustle turns them off.

-- Security concerns. “Soviet media hit hard on the security area,” said Azarkh. “Palestinians everywhere. Shootings everywhere.” The tourists, who are not taken to the occupied territories where the Palestinian uprising has made travel risky, expressed surprise at the calm of life within Israel proper.

A related concern regards housing for the newcomers, particularly the possibility of settling them in the occupied West Bank. When Housing Minister David Levy raised the prospect, Yossi Sarid, a liberal member of Parliament, declared: “At this point, I don’t see the waves of immigrants. But Levy has now ensured that they will go elsewhere by making it clear that we wish to turn them into cannon fodder.”

Azarkh, who proclaims himself “a Zionist in every way,” said he would take the opportunity to settle an immigrant wherever possible. “We look everywhere for houses and jobs,” he said. If the government has built a Jewish settlement on the Arab-populated West Bank, “for us it is kosher enough.”

-- Religious atmosphere. Azarkh presented the disincentive point of view: “These people (Soviet emigrants) are running from their Jewishness. Now, do they want to move to a state full of Jews? In many cases, no. They don’t want to be affiliated.”

Shkolnikson, the former engineer, said that Soviet media present Israel as a place of heavy religious pressure, where matters of faith would suffocate normal life. But, he noted, “The next street is full of ultra-Orthodox people, and it’s very nice. If that’s what religion means here, God bless.”