New Tel Aviv plan hopes to give immigrants a soft landing

Tel Aviv is already the White City, but for its thousands of Western immigrants, city officials are hoping a new initiative will also make it the right city.

The Tel Aviv-Jaffa municipality on Wednesday unveiled a five-pronged strategic plan meant to ease the integration of English, French and Spanish-speaking immigrants into the city. The vast majority of these Tel Aviv newcomers, said Eytan Schwartz, senior adviser to the mayor of Tel Aviv, come to Israel’s cultural capital with work experience and high expectations, but often face the stumbling blocks of poor Hebrew and culture gaps.

The new plan, Schwartz explained, is meant to help them find a smoother integration into Israeli culture and hopefully prevent them from throwing in the towel and returning to their home countries.

The strategic plan will encompass housing, employment, access to information, culture and social engagement, and its implementation will range from English-language networking workshops for jobseekers to a new Facebook page for Tel Aviv immigrants to a municipal representative holding regular office hours to answer questions in English, French and Spanish. These moves will come in tandem with a flurry of cultural events targeted specifically at immigrants and a brand-new housing resources program through The Young Adults Center at Mazeh 9. That program, which is aimed at all young Tel Aviv residents and will also be conducted in Hebrew, includes an English-speaking lawyer on site to help flustered newcomers navigate rental contracts, maneuver landlord-tenant relations and even just find out if they are overpaying on rent.

It can take a time to learn Hebrew, municipal officials said, but the program’s goal is to ensure that Western immigrants — who now make up more than half of the 15,000 immigrants living in Tel Aviv — feel welcomed and supported along the way.

“These are city services, and you make aliya, and it’s hard enough as it is,” said Jay Schultz, an Anglo immigrant himself who heads the TLV Internationals community. “Lowering a hurdle to keep them here so they have more time to integrate … let them have their cushion, which for some people is six months or five years. Hopefully they’ll be here the rest of their lives and they can get to where they need to [with Hebrew].”

Guy Seemann, founder of Kol Oleh, a movement which aims to empower young immigrants in Tel Aviv, praised the initiative and said he hopes it will further his own program’s goal of getting leaders and immigrants in better communication with each other.

“I think it’s a wonderful thing that this is happening,” he said. “I’m very intrigued to see the policy behind it and how they came up with these ideas. This is a definite sign that people are starting to understand the need and the impact on society that this community has in Tel Aviv. And that impact is much greater than their actual numbers.”

More information on the various aspects of this project can be found at www.tel-aviv.gov.il/eng. The municipality has also unveiled a new email address specifically for immigrants seeking information; it is telaviv.olim@gmail.com.