Russian language in Israel

The Russian language in Israel is spoken natively by a large proportion of the population, reaching about 20 percent of the total population by 1989, mostly by immigrants who came from the former Soviet Union in the early 1990s and later years. It is a major foreign language in the country and is used in many aspects of life. Russian is by far the most used non-official native language in Israel. The government and businesses often provide information in Russian, and it is semi-official in some areas with high concentration of Russian Jewish immigrants. The Russian-speaking population of Israel is the world's third-largest population of Russian native-speakers living outside the former Soviet Union territories after Germany and the United States, and the highest as a proportion of the population. As of 2013, 1,231,003 residents of the Post-Soviet states have immigrated to Israel since the fall of the Soviet Union. As of 2017, there are up to 1.5 million Russian-speaking Israelis.

The first large scale immigration of Russian-speaking Soviet Jews to post-1948 Israel occurred during the 1970s, but the "great migration" did not start until the late 1980s, during the last years of the Soviet Union.

About 100,000 Jews emigrated from the Soviet Union to Israel from 1971 to 1974. Most of them were from Georgia; the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania; and areas annexed by the Red Army in 1939–1940, mostly Poland. Soviet authorities allowed this emigration by calling it "family reunification," to avoid the appearance that anyone was unhappy living in the Soviet state. These emigrants held strongly Zionist views and took the opportunity to settle in their historic homeland. Less than half of those who emigrated in the 1970s wave came from Slavic countries, i.e., Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, even though about 80% of Soviet Jews lived there at the time.

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