Itongadol.- Yehudit and Yehoshua Taylor made aliyah two weeks ago and already their four year old daughter Temima is in school. Living in the new suburb of Ramat Bet Shemesh Gimmel, the Florida couple are one of thousands of newly arrived families that are now faced with the challenge of integrating both into general society and the Jewish state\’s educational system.
The past year\’s rapid rise in immigration has significantly increased the number of foreign born students in Israel, the Ministry of Immigrant Absorption announced on Sunday.
According to the Ministry\’s figures, 2900 children of immigrants will be beginning school for the first time in Israel this week, up fifty percent from last year. The numbers tracked general immigration trends with French students leading the pack at 1150, followed by Ukrainian (500), Russians (470) and Americans (270).
Around fifteen hundred of the students will learn in Tel Aviv area schools, with another 400 in the south, 600 in the north and 400 in the Jerusalem region.
“Everything is just a little bit more informal in general,” Yehudit said of the local school system. "In America everything was a lot more up front and more paperwork involved. Everything in America felt very serious all the time.”
Even though they have yet to provide their first tuition check, their daughter is already attending her kindergarten, Yehudit continued.
Asked if she felt that the government had provided active support during this transitional period, she said that her experience was that help is available but you "have to really be able to reach out and ask."
“It won\’t come to you there isn\’t a whole lot of handholding."
"In America our daughter wasn\’t allowed in the building until we sent all the medical records and showed up to date on all immunizations and here they didn\’t ask to see any medical records we haven\’t paid anything yet- we haven\’t set up our banking yet," agreed her husband Yehoshua.
Overall, the couple said that they are very happy with their daughter\’s new, Israeli, school, but that it is still early days for them.
The one worry, Yehudit said, is that she will be unable to help her daughter with all of her homework as she advances through the grades.
While she has lived in Israel in the past, her Hebrew may not be up to the task.
“She will understand things I don’t," she said.
“I\’m nervous there will be moments when she will be frustrated with me that I won’t understand her and be able to help her with something she needs helps with. This will be a moment of humility for me. But mostly I\’m happy that my daughter can have something I never had, the opportunity to learn this language form a much younger age.”
According to the Ministry, Minister Zeev Elkin met with Education Minister Naftali Bennett to cooperate on addressing the needs of new immigrants. According to activists involved in facilitating the flight of Jews from war-torn Ukraine, many of the children who arrive here are in need of supplemental psychological services.
According to Jewish Agency chairman Natan Sharansky, last year was “a year of record-breaking aliya" due in part to economic pressures and rising anti-Semitism in France and the civil war in Ukraine.
The rise in immigrant students is a “another clear sign that we are in a period of historically significant increase in the number of immigrants to Israel,” Elkin said Sunday.
“This is not only happy news but also a huge challenge Israeli education system and society as a whole. If we can not deal with many difficulties in absorbing immigrant students" the entire absorption process may be damaged, he added.
According to figures provided to the Post by the absorption Ministry, 5627 Frenchmen have made aliyah this year, followed by 4746 Ukrainians, 4117 Russians and 2120 Americans.
Over three quarters of the Jewish population of the eastern Ukrainian separatist stronghold of Donetsk have become refugees since the beginning of last year, with increasing numbers making aliyah as the conflict drags on and the economy collapses.
Meanwhile, speaking to the Post in May, one Russian Jewish leader said that he believes that rising Russian immigration to Israel is being driven partly by anxieties over Moscow’s increasingly authoritarian policies.
The number of Russians arriving in Israel in the first quarter of 2015 was nearly 50 percent higher than that experienced during the corresponding period last year.