Now the number that matters most. Asked whether the surge in antisemitism is pushing people onto the plane, Rosenberg answers with a figure: a mere 9% of applicants even mention it in their essays. "The people making aliyah today are typically driven by their values," he says.
Read that against the story the general press, and some of Israel's adversaries, prefer to tell: Jews evacuating a hostile America, Israel as a bunker of last resort. The application essays say the opposite. Americans are choosing Israel at 29, with careers ahead of them, not escaping at 60 with suitcases. A country people flee to is a refuge. A country people choose is a home. The second is the far stronger claim, and it is the true one.
Americans are choosing Israel at 29, with careers ahead of them, not escaping at 60 with suitcases.
Listen to who is boarding. Martin Cohen moved from Brooklyn to Ra'anana at 13 with no Hebrew, was offered a shot at the national soccer team, and chose a pre-army program instead: "I decided I'd rather defend my country than just play football." Dr. Vladimir Belkin, 35, came from Yekaterinburg to Beersheva in 2023, now lectures interns at Soroka in Hebrew, and just welcomed his second daughter, his first sabra. Danielle Adessky, 30, arrived from Toronto this summer and found strangers in Tel Aviv putting her up and helping her hunt for work: "Everywhere we turn, there are old friends and new ones." Kim Bash, a secular South African who came via New York in 2004 and is raising five children in Jerusalem, puts words to what binds them: "everyone here are my brothers and sisters, regardless of our backgrounds, our politics, our religious observance." That sentence is the whole Jewish people in one breath.
There is one testimony, though, that American Jewish institutions should read twice. A family explains that when their daughter turned 5, "we knew we couldn't afford the Jewish day schools in America. Even with scholarships, they were totally cost-prohibitive." In Israel, their kids have bus drivers who wish them Shabbat shalom. This is the under-discussed engine of aliyah: not fear, but the price of Jewish continuity in the United States. When raising a Jewish child becomes a luxury good, a plane ticket to Ben Gurion becomes the affordable option. That is a verdict on tuition, and a challenge to every federation and donor in America. Jewish life should never depend on an income bracket.
And here is the frontier. Studies show more than half of American Jews have never set foot in Israel. Yet those who visit, Rosenberg notes, are often the ones who come back to stay. His target is unabashed: "If we've already helped 100,000 do that in our first 25 years, why not 300,000 in the next 25?" The pipeline to the next 100,000 is not antisemitism. It is a first trip. For the diaspora, the assignment is simple and joyful: go see the house before deciding whether to move in.
