Jews and Israel again

On a certain IRC channel a few friends of mine was talking about the following: one of them found some organization in Turku that was encouraging Russian Jews to "return" to Israel and was surprised by it, and the rest were surprised by it too. I did not take part in the conversation because I had some Lisp software to debug, and by the time I noticed the conversation most of the participants left already.

Folks, the organization in Turku has a point: Russia is a bad place for a Jew. It is no accident that 2/3 of the Jewish people who lived in Russia in late 1980s now live somewhere else. OTOH, if the Jews remaining in Russia need an organization from Turku to point out that other countries might be better, they are a Darwin case anyway. Israel is not the best place, I can recommend the USA or Finland instead, but the States and Finland are hard to get in, whereas Israel has it written into law that it has to admit all the Jews who want in, unless they are complete fuckers (murderers, terrorists and suchlike).

In any case I think that the Russian period in Jewish history is starting to be over.

One of my friends taking part in the conversation asked how many Israelis have been originally from somewhere else. The answer is that 2 million out of Jewish and other non-Arab population of 5.4 million are from elsewhere. For some reason the statistical yearbook of Israel does not collect this info on Arabs, or at least doesn't put it in the same place as the statistics on everyone else.