‘Paris attacks may spur Jewish emigration’

The slaying of four Jews at a Paris kosher market may cause a substantial increase in the number of Jews who will immigrate to Israel this year, Jewish Agency Chairman Natan Sharansky says.

Sharansky arrived in Paris Sunday aboard the plane that brought Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman to France to attend a mass rally and march through Paris’s center in protest of the killing of 17 people last week by Islamists in and around the French capital.

“Before the attack, our estimates spoke of 10,000 new olim in 2015,” says Sharansky, using the Hebrew word for Jews who immigrate to Israel, or make aliyah. “In two weeks’ time we will reexamine this estimate in light of the current developments,” he told JTA at an event promoting aliyah among 55-year-olds and older in central Paris.

— JTA