Learning from Experience? Israeli Schools and the Task of Immigrant Absorption

Throughout the world today immigration is a phenomenon of large-scale numbers. ¹ Israel is no exception. In 1919, 51,000 Jews lived in what was to become in 1948 the State of Israel; now (mid-1995) there are close to five million. Many of the immigrants came in large waves. The first, around 1950, doubled the Jewish population, adding more than 600,000 new immigrants to the existing numbers. In the 1970s another wave of immigration brought some 149,000 olim from the USSR. ² Between 1 January 1989 and 31 December 1994 some 545,000 new immigrants arrived from the USSR/FSU.