The Great Aliyah from the Soviet Union

Seventy years of Soviet rule had nearly erased Jewish life: closed synagogues, Hebrew banned, 'nationality' stamped in the passport, exit refused. From the late 1960s came the refuseniks, who applied to leave and lost their jobs for it; the best known, Natan Sharansky, spent nine years in prison and labour camps, more than four hundred days of it in punishment cells. Hebrew was taught underground, books copied by hand, festivals kept in apartments.

In 5750 the gates opened. In 1990 alone some 185,000 arrived, and nearly 150,000 more in 1991. Between 5749 and 5760 about a million people came to Israel from the former USSR — roughly one Israeli in five today is connected to that aliyah.

They came as engineers, physicians, musicians and scientists: educated people without the language and without recognised credentials. The image of the era is a conservatory-trained violinist playing on Dizengoff Street. Within a few years that changed, and the aliyah supplied Israeli medicine, science and high-tech with enough specialists to reshape the economy.

A separate story is the return to tradition: people whose great-grandfathers were rabbis and whose grandfathers were Komsomol members opened a Torah for the first time as adults.