Ministers green-light European immigration program

Hours after Netanyahu calls for Europe’s Jews to move to Israel, the government okays an NIS180-million ($46-million) plan to promote immigration from France, Ukraine and Belgium, according to a statement.

“We are preparing for a wave of [Jewish immigration] from Europe; we are calling for a wave of mass aliya from Europe. I want to tell all the Jews of Europe, and Jews wherever they may be: ‘Israel is the home of every Jew… Israel awaits you with open arms,’” Netanyahu said hours earlier.

France and Belgium have both been the target of attacks against the Jewish community over the last year, amid fears of rising anti-Semitism.

In Ukraine, an ongoing war with Russian-backed separatists has caught the country’s Jewish community in the crossfire. Last week a Jewish woman was killed when a rocket hit her home near Donetsk, two days after a shell slammed into a Jewish center in Kramatorsk but did not explode.

 

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