The Seattle Times · Seattle, WA · 19 April 1998

CP-1998-035

Pressures from within, without

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Transcribed from the clipping

If concern about security has been one constant in Israel’s 50 years, change has been another. Growth has been steady and, in the 1990s, explosive. As happened after World War II, Israel again has become the destination for hundreds of thousands of Jews from other countries and societies. The economy is stratifying into richer and poorer.

The dream of a common language is harder to hold. Even the singular religious and cultural identity that has been Israel’s strength for 50 years seems shaken. Almost from the beginning, Israel has opened its arms for any Jew who wanted to come. The Jewish population doubled right after World War II, when the Holocaust survivors streamed in.

In more recent years, the country has assimilated millions of immigrants from the former Soviet Union, Morocco and Ethiopia. About 800,000 immigrants from the former Soviet Union alone have arrived since 1989; the Israelis call them “the Russians,” and they now make up one-seventh of the population.

Some 36 percent of the 13.8 million Jews worldwide now live within Israel’s borders. Many immigrants are poverty-stricken and face little hope of true assimilation. Many don’t speak Hebrew, the Israelis’ chosen language, or English, the country’s second language. Many have inadequate housing.

Ethiopian immigrants complain of being isolated in muddy trailer communities in the north. Many immigrants from the former Soviet Union are trained, skilled professionals who say there is little work for them in their true professions.

The problem of too many immigrants and too few jobs has exacerbated an economic recession that many blame on the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

How this transcription was made

Date and publication rest on the collector's slide label; no masthead, folio or printed dateline appears on this clipping, and nothing on it contradicts the label. Adjudicated against the printed page: Folio line across the top right of the page, set in small caps: 'THE SEATTLE TIMES • SUNDAY, APRIL 19, 1998'. Top left of the same rule carries the page slug 'M 10' and the section flag 'ISRAEL AT 50'. 19 April 1998 was a Sunday. Paper corrected, date confirmed. This is NOT a lineage case: The Seattle Times and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer were two separate newspapers that shared business operations under a joint operating agreement; the P-I went on publishing under its own masthead. The folio names the Times and that is what the record shoul

Context added by this archive

Also on the page: a dominant photograph of the Safed cemetery, caption “ALMOST A QUARTER-MILLION JEWS have been buried in this Safed cemetery since the 1300s. Highly revered rabbis are buried in sarcophagi, which are painted blue and where the faithful go to pray.”; a second photograph captioned “IT IS SAID IN SAFED that when the Messiah comes, he will walk up these steps.

An old woman used to sit in the pathway with tea and cakes, awaiting his return.”; and a chronology strip along the foot running 1971–1984. None of these are the article and none are transcribed as excerpt.

Cite this clipping

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