On the Eve of Independence Day: A Final Call to American Jewry - Haggai Segel's Article in This Week's Mekor Rishon

Immigrants emigrated by the hundreds of 
thousands from Arab countries? Why not 
North America?

Here is Claude's translation of Haggai Segel's Hebrew article from this week's Mekor Rishon. I have not checked it for accuracy, but even with small errors you get the point.

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On the Eve of Independence Day: A Final Call to American Jewry

Israel is about to turn 80, yet our brothers in the United States still delay their coming, save for a small handful of true Zionist righteous souls. The time has come to tell them clearly what we think about that.

During Chol HaMoed Passover, between one air raid siren and the next, in an underground study hall in Jerusalem, a young relative of mine was brought into the covenant of Abraham our father. They named the newborn Adir Tzion. His proud father explained in English that the name honors the famous American fighter jet — the stealth aircraft — that the IDF used so effectively in the war against Iran. The charismatic mohel also spoke in English, between the Hebrew blessings and songs.

English is a language with a strong vocal presence on our streets. When I was a child, no one spoke English on the street or at the corner store. My late mother, a native of London, had no neighbors she could chat with in the language of Shakespeare and Churchill. Moroccan, Polish, Romanian, Hungarian, French, and Yiddish dominated the conversations of the adult population around her. Russian and Georgian began filtering in at the start of the seventies, and Amharic from the eighties and nineties — but those are gradually fading. Only English is rising and flourishing as a second language.

It is possible that immigrants from other countries make a greater effort to switch to Hebrew when outside their own homes, due to the diasporic connotations of their native language and the prejudices of native-born Israelis. Immigrants from North America and Britain have no similar complex. English is the world's leading medium of communication, the language of diplomacy and high-tech, and certainly the foreign language most familiar to native Israelis. So, amid all the sounds of English, one sometimes gets the feeling that half of American Jewry has already made aliyah in the last generation — like the mother of little Adir Tzion (his father made aliyah from Britain). Sadly, this impression is very mistaken.

The largest Jewish diaspora in the world — Israel's last great demographic hope — trickles here drop by drop, in a manner so stingy it borders on an insult to the vision of the Return to Zion. It has never streamed here en masse the way other exiles did: Morocco, Yemen, Iraq, and others. The Russian diaspora has shrunk dramatically in recent generations, from roughly 800,000 in 1970 to only about 120,000 today, while the American diaspora has only grown. Even when we are jubilantly informed of a "record-breaking aliyah from the United States," it amounts to the meager joy of a destitute man who received a dollar from his millionaire cousin — not even a tenth of a percent of what that cousin could afford.

Since the founding of the state, approximately 180,000 Jews have made aliyah from the United States in total. According to data from the Ministry of Aliyah and Absorption, 3,773 people made aliyah in 2025. That is only six hundredths of one percent of the estimated American Jewish population according to the tireless demographer Prof. Sergio Della Pergola — 6.3 million. That estimate is somewhat generous in how it defines Jewish identity relative to strict halachic standards, but our Law of Return is also fairly generous and accommodating of intermarriage realities in the diaspora. For every ten thousand American Jews, only about five made aliyah in the past civil year. In 1971, the true all-time peak year, just over eight thousand made aliyah — a mere thousandth of the total Jewish population in that vast diaspora. In other words, even in the peak of all peak years, only ten American Jews out of every ten thousand troubled themselves to go to the land of their forefathers — and there is no doubt it is indeed a great deal of trouble and an exhausting spiritual effort. A native-born Israeli will not understand this.

Israel is about to turn 80, yet our brothers in the United States still delay their coming — all but a small handful of truly Zionist righteous souls. The time has come to tell them clearly what we think about that.

Other wars produced even thinner aliyah numbers. In the first four years after the founding of the state, only about two thousand American Jews arrived, compared to roughly 700,000 immigrants from all other diasporas. None of Ben-Gurion's pleadings, anger, or threats helped. He was the most demanding prime minister on the subject of aliyah, and did not hesitate to sharply insult Jewish leaders across the ocean. He stated outright that their Zionism was hypocrisy, and that if they were Zionists, then he was no longer a Zionist. I wrote an entire chapter about this in my book Mashiach B'Sdeh Boker, and in the end I had to note that it didn't help. They didn't come. The gates of Russia were opened near the end of Ben-Gurion's era, when the Soviets still ruled the Kremlin; the gates of America remained locked by choice.

Even Natan Alterman implored them to come. In August 1967, after a hundred thousand Palestinian war refugees registered in a single day for Operation Return Home to Judea and Samaria, and the right was seized with security anxiety, Alterman wrote in the newspaper that he was more troubled by the fact that not even a hundred Jews had registered for aliyah that same day. "This fact is a bolt of lightning illuminating the growth of an absurdity, which not only the security authorities need to take notice of," the poet wrote, explaining that "aliyah is necessary for us so that the efforts of the Jewish people's revival, and its arguments with the nations of the world to open the gates, do not ultimately stand before open gates that are empty with no one coming — and do not become a global joke, where the only question will be who laughs first, us or the world around us. If things unfold that way, clearly it will not be the Jewish people who laugh last."

The Jewish people has since laughed with joy many times — during Operation Solomon, for instance, or the enormous aliyah from the former Soviet states — but the continued stubbornness of American Jews in resisting redemption is indeed grounds for global ridicule at our expense. Because of it, because of them, we have not yet managed to resolve the demographic problem. A mass aliyah after the Six Day War could have enabled the settlement of a million Jews in Judea and Samaria, could have saved Gush Katif and the Yamit region of blessed memory, and of course the Galilee and the Negev. The IDF's manpower shortage problems would have been resolved despite the ultra-Orthodox draft-dodging — at least the ultra-Orthodox live here and contribute as best they can to solving the demographic problem. But our brothers in the American diaspora chose to remain on the banks of the Hudson, and we chose to silently accept their staying there.

No one hurls harsh words at them in the spirit of the Amora Reish Lakish's rebuke to the Jewish community of Babylon — the America of his day — which remained indifferent to the Zionist enterprise in the time of Ezra: "I hate you before God. Had you made yourselves like a wall and all gone up in the days of Ezra, you would have been compared to silver which rot cannot touch. Now that you have gone up like doors, you are compared to cedar which rot can affect" (Babylonian Talmud, Yoma 9b).

American Jews go up neither like a wall nor like doors. We send them emissaries, we melt with admiration at the initiatives of Nefesh B'Nefesh, occasionally muster the courage to hint that they ought to make aliyah — but we have long since stopped morally condemning the decision of the vast majority to cling to the diaspora. By our values and theirs, this is of course a legitimate choice; by the Jewish principle of free will as well. But by those same values and that same principle, it is our right and our duty to tell them clearly what we think of them. Enough flattery.

Dear brothers, you are betrayers (traitors - בוגדים). You betray us and you betray yourselves. When you pray three times a day "Sound the great shofar for our freedom, and raise a banner to gather our exiles" — you don't really mean it, because the shofar has already sounded, and there is no longer any technical or political obstacle to the ingathering of our exiles, only a selfish obstacle on your part. There are still many Jews in Europe, Australia, Canada, and South America as well — but you are ten times larger than them statistically, your absence is felt many times over, and no marginal benefit, financial or political, can cover for it. Therefore there is no longer any escaping the drawing of conclusions.

After all, Israel is about to turn eighty. Seventy years have already passed since Rabbi Soloveitchik's stirring Independence Day address — "Kol Dodi Dofek" — in which he mourned the continued slumber of "the faithful of Judaism" in America despite the wake-up calls from the Land of Israel. How long can we wait? What else needs to happen to you or to us before you pack your bags and board a plane?

Perhaps the time has come to issue an ultimatum: Dear brothers, if you do not come here en masse within five years — by Independence Day 5791, 2031 — we will stop sending you emissaries and dismantle the Jewish Agency. There is not much point left in their mission or its existence anyway. Those who wanted to make aliyah have already done so. Those still deliberating should decide quickly. The Chief Rabbinate should simultaneously declare that in 5791 it will stop including diaspora Jews in the halachic calculations of "the majority of its inhabitants dwelling within it," which pertain to certain Torah commandments connected to the Land. Such a declaration would shake primarily religiously observant Jews — but they are also the ones who pray three times a day, or at least once a week, and may yet repent.

The rest of the Jews there are already mentally disconnecting from us at an ever-increasing speed, partly to justify the shame of their voluntary exile. Too many readily submit to antisemitic propaganda. Some have even sunk to the low of supporting Hamas's invasion of Israeli territory on October 7th. Those who don't believe it can read on the Haaretz website the extensive interview with Ariel Angel, editor of the successful anti-Zionist magazine Jewish Currents. What do they have to do with us? What do we have to do with them? Judaism is not genetics — it is above all an idea, and the Land of Israel is one of its central pillars, not scaffolding that can be removed and still expect the building to stand. A mass aliyah to Israel soon would be a rescue aliyah for American Jews. Somehow they will survive the rising tide of antisemitism — but their Judaism will not survive without the Land of Israel.