Opinion & Comment
The Russians are Coming!

Perhaps we should begin with the subject of the Law of Return which is, actually, the very core of the problem, but no one is prepared to grapple with it.

For over the past decade, it has been government policy to bring over a massive wave of immigrants, even though they are not Jewish. This is a fact which is, to our regret, not clear to the public.

Some time back, the activities of the Foundation for Promoting Childbirth were curtailed due to a limited budget. On the other hand, however, no one is fully aware of the huge expenditures involved in this mass immigration. I will only say that one child in Project Naaleh, which for the past few years has not brought over any Jews, costs sixty thousand shekel a year, according to figures compiled five years ago. It would be worthwhile to make a calculation how many Jewish children could have been born using all the money spent on that.

Demographically speaking, we are trying to maintain and preserve a Jewish majority in the country, but the government is concealing the fact from the public that regarding aliya in recent years, it has actually been serving the exact opposite cause by reducing it or rather, decreasing the Jewish population balance!

Today, the Statistics are Pretty Clear

If the figures would be released in their full picture, it would prove the true catastrophe of the high percentage of non-Jewish immigrants. Suffice it to glance at the figures of 1994 in order to get a true and painful picture. In that year, the percentage of non-Jews among Russian immigrants stood at some 30 percent, though in a table, it appears only as 8.3 percent. Where did the rest of those non-Jews disappear?

The solution to this question was formulated quite simply by the people at the Central Bureau of Statistics: All those who were registered under the category "Not Registered" are certainly not Jewish. But they do not figure in the statistics of "Non-Jewish" since they are not registered as non-Jewish. This is how the figure was reduced from a 30 percent to a mere 8.3 percent.

What, then, is the purpose in this large immigration wave?

In my opinion, the goal is to change the population makeup. The importation of a non-Jewish population is aimed at subduing demographically the religious and Oriental bloc in the population, in effacing the Jewish character of Israeli society.

Can you prove this?

Some time ago, in a public notice posted around town, we quoted the coordinator of the activities of the Ezra movement, who heard first-hand from a Jewish Agency shaliach in Moscow that "there is a shortage in Israel of a normal, non-religious leftist element. There are several ways of solving this shortage. One of them is to bring over gentiles and build with them a normal society and at the same time, to solve the problem of the chareidim."

I have a rich collection of phrases and quotes along the same lines of the elite segment of past Russian immigrants, who are by now veteran Israelis: politicians, newspapermen, artists. It is clear that many others think likewise but are cautious about expressing this view publicly.

You have been projecting a very gloomy future for many years already. Today it is making an impression. In your opinion, is your prediction coming true?

Some ten years ago I already warned that within the decade, some half a million goyim would have settled here by now, but the reality is even worse than I imagined. I warned then that the non-Jewish masses would organize their own political parties which, to begin with, would be run by Jews but would serve their interest of continued immigration from Russia. Today, there are three such parties. I said then that the more power they mustered, the sooner they would turn force against Jews, themselves, and the goals which they would identify as Jewish, beginning with the Jewish families of Russian immigrants and going on to the veteran religious families.

I can enumerate a long list of such instances, and in fact, a not insignificant portion of the crimes that have rocked the country in the past few years and been presented to the public by the media as regular civil offenses were really anti-religious attacks carried out by Russian gentiles against Jews on an antisemitic basis.

Some would call your words racist. How can you pass judgment upon a whole segment of innocent immigrants?

G-d forbid! I don't mean to be all inclusive. But accusations of racism issuing from the mouths of those who despise chareidi Judaism in general and the Oriental community in particular bring to mind the dark periods of discrimination of not too long ago. But to say the truth, and the seal of Hashem is, after all, truth, we must emphasize that a population within a population is naive and innocent. Every nation can be described as simultaneously innocent, ill fated, straightforward and goodhearted, and it would hold true. It is certainly true of the Russian people, the Belarussians, the Ukrainians in their countries and also of these nationalities who settled in Eretz Yisrael in the past decade.

It should also be noted that no country breeds criminals that are characteristic to it, but the criminals of every nationality share similar traits. And this is the whole point -- together with the non-Jewish population which was brought over here they imported as well all those negative phenomena to be found in those communities in the land of their origin, including antisemitic attacks on Jews and Jewish objects. Even the ministers of education and welfare in the countries of origin of those immigrants are well aware of the dimensions of these problems in their own countries, and do what is in their power to reduce or limit it. Yet, despite the proliferation of incidents, one can hardly include the greater majority which is not like that and slur it collectively. Still in all, there is a definite tendency to obfuscate the dimensions of this problem.

To cover up? For what purpose?

For two purposes. Fabricated stories that these phenomena are caused by absorption difficulties and lack of identity are designed, first and foremost, to squeeze more and more monies for all kinds of `projects,' but mainly, to distract the public from the fact that the gentile population here is growing and that the country has already turned into a tri- national state.

What, then, can be done?

The chareidi public must be very circumspect and take into account the rich experience of Jewish communities in the Diaspora, past and present. They must study the essential differences between their situation and ours, and we need not elaborate. As for public action, we must do everything possible to curb the non-Jewish public in Israel to begin with. And to judge from what the public has accomplished in the past decade, the picture is grim, indeed, to say the least.

Today, there is no possible way to halt this phenomenon and it has become a fixed fact of life. The flow of gentile immigration is steady like a pipeline, based primarily upon the so-called Law of Return, real or fictitious, by aliya factors and the stream of family-consolidations which naturally accompanies this forced-fed initiated immigration. The vast political Russian establishment, dominating the right, left and center, including religious circles, via the three Russian parties, will stem every attempt to change legislation or the immigration policy.

Actually, there are hardly any incoming Jews to justify the immigration apparatus. But we are talking about the agencies who are directly responsible for justifying their own existence and the fat salaries which their shlichim receive in the various cities throughout Russia who urge goyim to immigrate to Israel on the basis of those ridiculous paragraphs inserted in the Law of Return. These enable the grandchildren of Jews -- no matter that they are goyim lemehadrin and that their parents are both gentile -- to come to Israel and receive the entire basket of benefits that adds up to quite a hefty sum.

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We asked R' Yigal to discuss the additional topic of gentile burial.

It began several years ago, after the rabbis of Arad refused to permit the burial of a gentile child in the local Jewish cemetery. A similar episode that stirred up an even greater public storm occurred when the rabbi of Shderot ordered that an infant be buried near the cemetery fence after it was determined that his mother was not Jewish. These two difficult events were utilized to the fullest by anti- religious politicians. Several cults, messianic `Jews,' tried to take a ride on this bandwagon of a bereaved mother whose child had been killed in a fatal accident.

In the wake of these episodes, a directive was issued to all the religious councils to set aside a special section in their local cemeteries for such cases. Here is the place to clarify that we are not talking about cases where there is doubt as to Jewishness, where there is lack of proof, which can generally be verified very quickly by experts, but of out- and-out gentiles, so declared.

The writer of these lines [B. Rabinowitz] heard several years ago a clearcut position from Maran R' Elyashiv that, "Gentiles must not be buried within the area set aside as a Jewish cemetery, even in a separate section." Therefore, it is necessary to establish an area outside the cemetery for the burial of gentiles. People with questionable antecedents are permitted to be buried in a separate section near the fence of the cemetery, but every effort must first be made to verify their real status and certainly, deceased people whose identity was not checked into, for whatever reason, or for convenience sake, may not be buried here with the benefit of the doubt.

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R' Yigal, you were among the first who raised the question of gentile burial in Jewish cemeteries. How can we deal with this problem, publicly and regarding the media, such as the recent case of a soldier who was buried in a separate section?

To begin with, this soldier was not buried, as you say, in a separate section, but, rather, in a separate row. And who can vouch that tomorrow, Jews will not be buried in that row, even observant, traditional Jews who believe in the transcendence of the soul?

Besides, Maran Harav Elyashiv already ruled that one must not allow for setting aside a place for the burial of non- Jews in a Jewish cemetery. Nevertheless, I think that there has been an improvement over the past. I, myself, heard one of the rabbis in the military rabbinate saying that soldiers and officers approach him who demand confirmation that they will be buried according to the Halocha if, G-d forbid, they fall in the line of duty. If they cannot receive such a guarantee, they are prepared to remove their uniform. These were their very words. Therefore, there seems to have been much progress made in the past decade, when I first attempted to move people to fight this battle, but no one took me up on it.

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