Yerida

Based on Wikipedia: Yerida

The Word That Cuts Both Ways

In Hebrew, geography carries moral weight. When a Jew moves to Israel, they don't simply immigrate—they make aliyah, which means "ascent." And when they leave? That's yerida: descent. The very language frames departure as a fall from grace.

This isn't just linguistic trivia. For over a century, these words have shaped how Jewish communities think about belonging, loyalty, and home. The terminology reaches back thousands of years to biblical narratives, yet it continues to influence modern debates about Israeli identity, diaspora politics, and what it means to be a Jew in an age of global mobility.

The roots run deep. In Genesis, when Abraham leaves the land of Canaan during a famine and travels to Egypt, the Hebrew text describes him as "going down." When Jacob and his sons later follow Joseph to Egypt, they descend as well. The Talmud makes the metaphor explicit: "The Land of Israel is higher than all other lands." This isn't about elevation above sea level—Jerusalem sits at roughly the same altitude as Denver—but about spiritual geography.

The Weight of Ancient Law

Jewish religious law, known as halakha, takes emigration seriously. The medieval philosopher Maimonides, writing in twelfth-century Egypt, ruled that permanent departure from the Land of Israel was permitted primarily in cases of severe famine. Not career opportunities. Not better weather. Famine.

Later authorities expanded the exceptions somewhat. The sixteenth-century rabbi Joseph Trani allowed departure for purposes like marriage, religious study, or earning a livelihood. But the underlying assumption remained: living in the Land of Israel represents a religious value, and leaving diminishes something essential.

There's an interesting theological concept that emerged from this tension: yerida letzorekh aliyah, meaning "descent for the purpose of ascent." The idea suggests that sometimes you have to go down before you can rise. It's remarkably similar to the modern notion of hitting rock bottom before recovery—the acknowledgment that falling can precede transformation.

The Messy Reality of Early Zionism

Here's something the triumphant narratives of Israeli founding often gloss over: the early Zionist settlement waves saw staggering departure rates. Historians estimate that between 40 and 90 percent of immigrants to Palestine during the First Aliyah (1881–1903) and Second Aliyah (1904–1914) eventually left.

Think about that range for a moment. Even the conservative estimate means nearly half of those idealistic pioneers—the ones who packed up their lives in Eastern Europe to build a Jewish homeland—gave up and went home within a year.

The reasons weren't mysterious: hardship, hunger, and disease. The romantic dream of farming ancestral soil collided with malaria, Ottoman bureaucracy, and the brutal reality that most European Jews had no idea how to work the land. Some historians place the departure rate as high as 80 to 90 percent for certain periods. The Zionist movement succeeded not because everyone who came stayed, but because enough people kept coming.

During the mid-1920s, record-keeping improved enough to capture the churn more precisely. Between 1926 and 1928, British Mandatory authorities recorded about 18,000 Jewish immigrants but also nearly 15,000 emigrants. The revolving door spun constantly.

The State and Its Exit Visa

After Israel declared independence in 1948, everything changed—including how the government thought about people leaving.

Between 1948 and 1951, Israel absorbed approximately 688,000 immigrants, a flood that more than doubled the Jewish population. These newcomers arrived from the displaced persons camps of Europe, from Yemen, from Iraq, from Morocco. Many had survived horrors. Many had nowhere else to go.

About 10 percent of them left anyway, heading to Canada, Australia, and South America. Fewer went to the United States, partly because the restrictive Immigration Act of 1924—originally designed to limit Southern and Eastern European immigration—still constrained entry.

Israel's response to emigration reveals how young states think about their citizens. From 1948 to 1961, Israelis needed not just a passport but an exit visa to leave the country, even temporarily. The government wanted to retain potential soldiers for the Israel Defense Forces and believed that emigration undermined national solidarity.

Additional restrictions made leaving even harder. Travelers couldn't easily transfer foreign currency, and airline tickets had to be purchased with funds sent from abroad. The message was clear: we need you here, and we'll make it bureaucratically painful to leave.

These restrictions eased only gradually. Court rulings and Knesset decisions eliminated the exit visa requirement in 1961. The Six-Day War in 1967 brought further liberalization. But administrative barriers lingered for years.

Counting the Departed

How many Israelis actually live abroad? This question has generated decades of controversy, inflated estimates, and political finger-pointing.

In 1980, Israeli officials commissioned a study that estimated between 300,000 and 500,000 Israelis were living in the United States alone, concentrated in New York City and Los Angeles. Two years later, a deputy minister cited 300,000 total emigrants since 1948, blaming housing shortages and unemployment.

The mid-1980s brought what many considered a yerida crisis. The aftermath of the controversial 1982 Lebanon War, combined with the 1983 bank stock crisis that devastated the Israeli economy, pushed departure rates to alarming levels. In 1984 and 1985, more Jews left Israel than arrived—a psychological blow to a state founded on the promise of ingathering.

Government officials threw around figures suggesting hundreds of thousands of Israelis living abroad. Some of these numbers were later questioned. A government statistician responsible for tracking emigration claimed fewer than 400,000 Israelis had left since 1948 without returning, and insisted that higher figures cited by other agencies weren't based on his bureau's data.

By 2003, Israel's Ministry of Immigration and Absorption estimated about 750,000 Israelis abroad—roughly 12.5 percent of the country's Jewish population. Five years later, they revised the number down to 700,000, with about 450,000 in North America and 50,000 to 70,000 in the United Kingdom.

Then came the Pew Research Center's 2012 analysis, which offered a dramatically different picture: approximately 230,000 Israeli-born Jews living abroad, representing only about 4 percent of Israel's native-born Jewish population. The discrepancy matters because it changes the narrative. Is Israel hemorrhaging its population, or experiencing normal migration patterns for a developed country?

The Definition Problem

Part of the confusion stems from who counts as an Israeli abroad.

Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics defines emigrants as individuals who lived outside the country continuously for more than one year after having resided in Israel for at least 90 consecutive days. But this technical definition obscures important distinctions.

Consider the children of Israeli expatriates. Under Israeli law, if an Israeli citizen has a child abroad, that child is automatically an Israeli citizen—even if they've never set foot in Israel. When Israeli consular officials count "Israelis" in Los Angeles or New York, these children inflate the numbers. An official from the Israeli consulate acknowledged in 2012 that many people in overseas population estimates weren't actually native-born Israelis but rather children of expatriates registered as citizens at birth.

There's also the category of American Jews who made aliyah, lived in Israel for years, then returned to the United States while retaining Israeli citizenship. Estimates of this group ranged from 30,000 to 60,000 by 1990, rising to 53,000 to 75,000 by 2000. Are they emigrants? Return migrants? The categories blur.

Why Israel Keeps More of Its People

Despite the hand-wringing about yerida, Israel actually retains immigrants at higher rates than most countries known for immigration.

Analysis of migration data between 1948 and 1994 shows Israel maintained a retention rate of approximately 80 percent—meaning only about 20 percent of immigrants eventually left. This exceeds the retention rates of the United States, Argentina, Brazil, Australia, and New Zealand.

Why? The demographer Sergio Della Pergola identified two factors in 2000.

First, the character of Jewish immigration to Israel. Unlike the young single men who typically dominate migration flows elsewhere, aliyah often involved entire families—parents, children, and elderly relatives all relocating together. Family ties anchor people in place. A young professional might chase opportunities abroad, but a multigenerational household with children in school and grandparents nearby is far less mobile.

Second, and more poignantly: many immigrants couldn't go back even if they wanted to. When your country of origin expelled you, confiscated your property, or made clear that Jews were unwelcome, return migration isn't really an option. The Jews who fled Iraq in 1950, the Yemeni Jews airlifted out, the Moroccan communities that emigrated en masse—these weren't people who could easily change their minds.

The Russian Connection

One of the more surprising migration patterns involves Israel and Russia.

In 2014, estimates suggested more than 100,000 Israeli citizens were living in Russia. This seems counterintuitive—why would people who left the former Soviet Union return?

The answer lies in the massive wave of Russian-speaking immigration to Israel in the 1990s, following the Soviet Union's collapse. Approximately one million people arrived, transforming Israeli society. But not everyone stayed, and some maintained lives in both countries.

Israeli cultural institutions now serve this Russian-Israeli population through cultural centers in Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Novosibirsk, and Yekaterinburg. Many divide their time between Israel and Russia, maintaining citizenship, business interests, and family connections in both places. The old binary of staying or leaving has given way to transnational lives spanning continents.

The American Picture

The United States remains the primary destination for Israelis who emigrate, and New York remains the epicenter of Israeli life in America.

In 1982, the demographer Pini Herman estimated about 100,000 Israeli emigrants in the United States, with roughly half in the New York metropolitan area and another 10,000 to 12,000 in Greater Los Angeles. A 2009 study for the UJA Federation of New York estimated approximately 41,000 Israeli immigrants living in New York specifically—suggesting remarkable stability over nearly three decades.

Data from the United States Department of Homeland Security shows that between 1949 and 2015, approximately 250,000 Israelis obtained permanent residency. The U.S. Census captured the growth: 95,000 Israel-born residents in 1990, rising to 125,000 in 2000 and 140,000 in 2010—a 30 percent increase in the final decade. About two-thirds of the 2010 figure held American citizenship.

Interestingly, data from U.S. immigration regularization programs in the early 1990s revealed relatively low levels of undocumented Israeli migration. Unlike many immigrant populations, Israelis in America have generally arrived through legal channels.

The Statistics That Disappeared

For decades, Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics published emigration figures in its Statistical Abstract. Then, sometime after the early 1970s, they stopped.

Why? Because the bureau's careful counts conflicted with the much larger numbers cited by other government agencies. Rather than adjudicate between competing estimates or challenge politically sensitive claims about yerida, the statisticians simply stopped publishing.

This institutional silence speaks volumes about how fraught emigration data can be. For a country whose founding narrative centers on the ingathering of exiles, every departure carries symbolic weight. Better, perhaps, not to count too precisely.

More recent estimates have had to be inferred from population projections. Between 1990 and 2005, the bureau assumed approximately 14,000 people emigrated per year, with spikes in 1993, 1995, and the early 2000s. The emigration rate actually declined during this period—from about 3 per thousand to 1 per thousand—but only because Israel's population grew faster than the number leaving.

What the Numbers Mean

In 2005, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development calculated Israel's expatriate rate at 2.9 per thousand, placing the country in the middle range among 175 nations examined. This is the driest possible way of saying: Israel is normal.

Normal countries have emigration. Normal developed economies see their educated professionals pursue opportunities abroad. Normal open societies let people leave and don't treat departure as betrayal.

Yet the language persists. Yerida still means descent. The moral geography encoded in Hebrew still frames leaving as falling. And Israeli public discourse still treats emigration with an anxiety that other countries reserve for genuine crises.

The Reasons People Give

When researchers ask Israeli emigrants why they left, several themes recur.

The high cost of living tops many lists. Israeli housing prices, particularly in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, have soared far beyond what ordinary salaries can support. Young couples who want to buy apartments face the choice between crushing debt and permanent renting. The comparison to American housing markets—where the same salary buys far more space—proves decisive for some.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict drives others away. Not necessarily because of immediate physical danger, though that plays a role, but because of the psychological toll of mandatory military service, reserve duty, periodic wars, and the sense of conflict without end. Some parents don't want to raise children who will inevitably serve in the army.

Academic and professional opportunities abroad attract the highly educated. Israel produces more scientists and engineers per capita than almost any other country, but it can't absorb them all. The path to a tenured professorship or a senior research position often runs through American or European institutions.

Finally, there's dissatisfaction with Israeli society itself—a category that encompasses everything from the influence of religious parties in politics to the intensity of Israeli interpersonal style to the simple desire for a different kind of life.

The View from Here

The story of yerida is ultimately a story about how nations imagine themselves and their citizens.

Zionism promised a homeland—a place where Jews would no longer be strangers in someone else's country. The entire project depended on people coming and staying. Every departure seemed to question the premise. If the homeland was truly home, why would anyone leave?

But this framing was always too simple. People have always moved for love, for work, for adventure, for escape. The Jews who left Eastern Europe for Palestine in the 1880s were themselves emigrants from somewhere. Their great-grandchildren who now leave Tel Aviv for Berlin or Los Angeles are continuing a pattern of mobility that long predates modern nationalism.

The language of ascent and descent will probably outlast any attempt to neutralize it. Hebrew carries its history in every word. But the moral weight attached to migration choices has shifted, at least among younger Israelis who feel less obligated by collective narratives they didn't choose.

In the end, yerida may tell us less about the people who leave than about the society that named their leaving a fall.