A Statue of Liberty for Tel Aviv?

When you do a lot of traveling as I did in the late 1990s, you come to expect certain things. One of those is the ubiquitous presence of USA Today under your hotel room door.

One of that newspaper's daily features is a small box appearing on the front page that contains news, more accurately information, about a particular subject. One morning, while staying overnight in Boston after speaking for State of Israel Bonds, I was pleasantly surprised to find a box containing statistics about immigration to Israel. I clipped it from the paper and put it in my daily calendar. I began to refer to the statistics in all my speeches.

The statistic? The number of people who had emigrated to Israel since 1948, It listed the refugees kicked out of their homes in Arab countries following the 1948 and 1967 wars, folks who voluntarily moved from western countries, and the number of Russians who came to Israel when the former Soviet Union opened the way to mass migration. The number is in the several millions.

This is what the Dry Bones cartoon had to say about it in 1990.

It was a modern miracle, and no country has more willingly opened its doors to emigres, indeed sought them, than Israel. You can read the full story here, Russian Aliya (1990) - the Dry Bones Blog

So, maybe a Statue of Liberty belongs alongside the runways at Ben Gurion Airport.

Well, that's what I have to say.

Stephen M. Flatow