c. 2007 Religion News Service

JERUSALEM _ For Tanya and Alex Pomson, life was good in Toronto, where the British-born couple had moved in 1996 to advance Alex’s career. He became a tenured professor at York University and she stayed home to raise their four children.

But happy as they were in Canada, the Pomsons, who are modern-Orthodox Jews, felt something was missing. The answer, they believed, was in Israel.

“Making `aliyah’ was something we had always wanted to do,” Alex said in the living room of their Jersulem apartment, using the Hebrew term for immigration to Israel. “There’s a real sense of being at the center of the Jewish world. It’s extraordinarily intense here _ sometimes a matter of life and death _ but there is a vitality here I’ve never felt anywhere else.”

“Our only regret,” he added, “is not coming sooner.”

The Pomsons, here since 2004, are among the small but growing number of Jews from Western countries choosing to relocate to Israel at a time when the number from non-Western countries is declining.

In a departure from the past, experts say, most of Israel’s immigrants are coming because they want to, not because they have to.

In 2006, the number from Asia, Africa, Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union totaled 12,000, according to the Jewish Agency for Israel, while 9,000 arrived from North America, Western Europe, South America and “Oceania” _ Australia and New Zealand.

“Most of today’s aliyah is an aliyah of choice,” said Zev Bielski, chairman of the Jewish Agency, the quasi-governmental body that encourages and facilitates immigration.

For decades, refugees have found safe haven in the world’s only Jewish country, which was founded in 1948, three years after the end of World War II and the Holocaust.

European Holocaust survivors “could not go back to the countries where they were persecuted and their families were killed,” said Hebrew University Professor Sergio DellaPergola, a leading Israeli demographer.

From the late 1940s through the ’60s, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians lost their homes during Arab-Israeli wars, roughly the same number of Jews from Middle Eastern countries became victims of what DellaPergola calls “the push factor” _ “forced out by the Arab populations in their respective societies.”

Jews living in the former Soviet bloc “suffered from cultural and religious discrimination for decades,” DellaPergola continues, explaining why they fled to Israel and other Westernized countries. Since communism’s fall, 1 million Soviet Jews flooded the country.

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Waves of aliyah “are unquestionably related to negative developments in (the Jews’) country of origin,” DellaPergola notes. “We saw that during times of instability in South Africa and Ethiopia, and more recently in the financial crash in Argentina and growing anti-Semitism in France.”

Yet even when today’s Jews feel compelled to leave their native countries for economic or security reasons, “making aliyah is a conscious choice,” DellaPergola stressed. “Many could go to the U.S. or Canada or Australia, but they choose Israel instead.”

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Religious, ideologically motivated Jews _ not only from the West but also Ethiopia and India _ are drawn to Israel largely because of their beliefs, said Gerald Steinberg, a political scientist from Bar Ilan University. “Jews have been praying for the restoration of the Jewish homeland for 2,000 years,” Steinberg said.

Consider the Pachuau family, members of the Bnei Menashe community in northeast India, which traces its roots to the biblical Kingdom of Israel. They moved to Israel late last year out of a deep sense of Jewish conviction.

“We love the Land of Israel the way the Torah instructs us to,” Ovadia Pachuau, the family’s 49-year-old patriarch, said of their decision.

While most Western immigrants immediately get apartments, the government houses all Bnei Menashe _ who are believed to be descended from one of the 12 Tribes of the Kingdom of Israel, all but two of them lost to history _ in Jewish Agency absorption centers. The families receive full board as well as intensive Hebrew lessons and job training.

So far, the Israeli government has brought over 1,000 of the 8,000 community members to Israel. Israel’s Chief Rabbinate approved the Indians’ formal conversion from Christianity to Judaism.

Pachuau, whose skin is bronzed and whose facial features are Asian, said his family converted to Judaism 13 years ago, and that his ancestors were Jews. “Christian missionaries converted our ancestors 100 years ago, but we always maintained some of our traditions,” he said after a Hebrew class at the Karmiel absorption center in northern Israel.

Meanwhile, the Pomsons, nearly three years after making aliyah, say they are glad they came _ despite some hiccups in their absorption process.

“It’s been a challenge,” Tanya said, referring to her children’s acculturation. “It’s been very difficult for the eldest two,” now 14 and 16. “We pulled them out of a very stable, happy, close-knit community. It’s been hard to find the right school, to ensure they don’t fall through the cracks.”

Alex does not have a tenured position in Israel, so must travel abroad every few weeks as a consultant. Tanya does “double duty” during his absences.

That their children will have to serve in the army or perform national service “has never been much of an issue,” she said. “It’s part of the deal. In Israel, you pay taxes and serve in the army.”

Alex said if he wants a reminder of why he moved his family to this volatile country, all he needs is the view from his office window at the Hebrew University.

“I see the Old City and the Temple Mount,” he said with a tinge of awe in his voice. “It’s the view that Jews have imagined and yearned for, for thousands of years.”

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