“Every day, eleven Jews leave France for Israel”. Aliyah from the West

Over 20,000 new Jewish immigrants from more than 100 countries have moved to Israel over the past year, despite the country’s ongoing security challenges. Russia, France and the United States account for the largest groups. 5,685 immigrants arrived from Russia, followed by 4,364 from France and 3,333 from the United States. A further 975 arrived from the United Kingdom.

Eleven Jews are therefore leaving France every day to move to the Jewish state. That is more than from Ukraine (797), a country that has been at war for four and a half years. More than from the United States, where there is a Jewish population of six million (compared with 400,000 in France). France has recorded a 31.5 per cent increase in departures, with 7,033 cases opened this year compared with 5,349 the previous year.

The UK also recorded a 68 per cent increase, from 1,348 to 2,264 departures, whilst Australia, following the attack in Bondi, saw the sharpest rise among the countries, with a jump of 89.7 per cent (from 311 to 590 immigrants). The figures from the UK are unprecedented following a wave of anti-Semitism that saw Jewish ambulances set alight, Jewish schools and shops vandalised, deadly attacks on synagogues, and stabbings on the streets of London. A community that had always been safe, even during Hitler’s war.

An annual study published by Tel Aviv University has found that 2025 was the deadliest year for anti-Semitic attacks since 1994, when a bomb attack on a Jewish centre in Argentina claimed 85 lives. In the United Kingdom, there were 3,700 incidents of anti-Semitism in 2025 – ten a day.

Jeremy Jacobs, a leader of the British Jewish community and former president of the United Synagogue in London, wrote in a letter to The Telegraph that he had put his house up for sale and packed his bags: “We’re off to Israel”. Jacobs urges others to follow him, before it is too late. “At the moment, we have the freedom to choose. But I wonder: how much longer will that last?”

The French Jewish community appears to be heading towards a slow but inexorable exodus. “France: a Jew is physically attacked every three days”, reads the headline in Le Parisien. Before 2012, “barely” 500 Jews were leaving France each year. That figure rose to 3,120 in 2013, the year following the Toulouse massacre (according to an article published in La Dépêche, Toulouse lost thirty per cent of its Jewish population following the jihadist attack on the Ozar Hatorah Jewish school, which claimed the lives of four people). In 2015, there were 7,500 departures in the wake of the attacks on Charlie Hebdo, Hyper Cacher and the Bataclan, and since then the average has been 3,000 per year. Now the figures are approaching the highest levels again: 4,364, an average of eleven a day.

And according to a survey, forty per cent of those who remain want to leave. Although Jews account for less than 0.8 per cent of the French population, half of the armed forces and police deployed on the streets are guarding Jewish schools and synagogues. Even at an average of 3,500 Jews a year, another 100,000 Jews will have disappeared within a generation.

This is thanks to “I nuovi antisemiti”, as Nora Bussigny calls them – the French reporter who went undercover among them and wrote a splendid book about it, now published in Italy by Setteottobre in a translation by Daniele Scalise. “After all, we feel safer in Israel than in France,” two new immigrants, Eléonore and Raphaël, tell Le Monde, before concluding with a heartfelt statement, spoken almost in a whisper: “You know, we don’t want to be the last to leave.”

The “last ones”? The reference to the 1930s and the dawn of the Second World War is clear. Eléonore confirms: “Yes, I’ve read Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday”. She says she was particularly struck by one aspect: “The memory of all the Jews who didn’t leave in time”.