5 - A New Home in America

Summary

In the mid-1950s, the United States became the largest destination for Israeli emigration. While Israeli emigrants heading to the United States did not experience the troubles faced by remigrants in Europe, the movement to the United States was not free of frictions and hardships. Migrants faced obstacles emanating from American immigration policies and from the negative attitude of Jewish aid organizations towards emigration from Israel. This attitude in turn led to debates among American Jews regarding the proper attitude towards Jewish migrants moving from Israel to the United States. Emigration from Israel subsequently became a polarizing issue in the American Jewish community. As the chapter shows, it played a similar role, with varying degrees of intensity, in other Jewish communities in the Americas such as those of Brazil and Canada.

Despite these difficulties, however, tens of thousands of emigrants from Israel were able to settle in America – and as their testimonies reveal, many succeeded in building new lives there. They thus repudiated the concept of the rejection of exile and offered a tangible alternative to the idea that Jewish existence outside Israel was pointless or untenable.