Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

Israel, Jewish groups discuss airlifting Ukraine’s Jews if Russia invades

This article originally appeared on Haaretz and was reprinted here with permission.

With a possible Russian invasion of Ukraine looming, a briefing held Sunday by top officials in the Israeli government and Jewish organizations discussed the level of threat to Jewish communities in Ukraine and the possibility that Israel will facilitate an evacuation program.

The meeting included representatives from the National Security Council, the Prime Minister’s Office, the foreign, defense, transport and diaspora affairs ministries, as well as the Jewish Agency and Nativ, the secretive government organization that maintains connections between Israel and Jews in the countries of the former Soviet Union.

While there is currently no major rise in the number of Ukrainian Jews requesting to immigrate to Israel, there is concern that should war break out in Ukraine and Jewish communities in the country be at risk in the ensuing chaos, thousands of Jews may seek shelter in Israel.

Jewish organizations assess that there are currently around 75,000 Ukrainian citizens in the eastern regions of the country, in and around the main cities of Odessa, Kharkiv and Dnipropetrovsk, who are eligible for Israeli citizenship under the Law of Return. While many of these may not seek to be evacuated or move to Israel, the situation has the potential to become the largest evacuation of Jews from a war-torn country in over three decades.

In the early 1990s, Israel evacuated over 14,000 Jews from Ethiopia just before the capital, Addis Ababa, fell to rebels. Smaller numbers were also evacuated from various regions in the collapsing Soviet Union, including Tajikistan, Abkhazia and Transnistria.

In 2008, a few dozen Jews were evacuated from the town of Gori by the Joint Distribution Committee relief organization during the Russia-Georgia War. In 2014, when Moscow-backed separatists supported by Russian forces took control of parts of the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine, hundreds of Jews were evacuated to a refugee camp in central Ukraine, from where many immigrated to Israel.

Israel and major Jewish organizations are in close contact with both the Russian and Ukrainian governments and are aware that both sides are anxious to avoid the impression that Jewish communities are not safe under their jurisdiction.

However, there are contingency plans that have existed for over 30 years, since the end of the 1980s when the Soviet government began allowing Jews to emigrate in large numbers, for emergency airlifts in case emigration has to be facilitated much faster and in dangerous circumstances. These are now being updated, though at present there isn’t a clear idea of whether they will be needed and whether organizing an evacuation airlift from Ukraine would even be possible in case of war.

This article originally appeared on Haaretz and was reprinted here with permission.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse..

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.