In my opinion, the future of the Jewish People will be played out in Israel.
Among the many outstanding qualities of the chareidi community of Eretz Yisrael, planning for the future does not rank near the top. The community has no professional organization comparable to Agudath Israel of America. The chareidi MKs come closest to constituting a professional group, but they have little in the way of resources at their disposal, and are too overwhelmed by the immediate demands on their time to devote much time to long-range planning. (Machon Haredi, founded by Mishpacha publisher Eli Paley, is the glaring exception to the failure to gather and analyze data about the community.)
Change, however, is inevitable, and it behooves us to study trend lines and attempt to anticipate the direction and magnitude of that change to the degree possible. One such trend is the large-scale aliyah to Eretz Yisrael of Jews from abroad that has already begun, and which, I believe, will continue to gain momentum.
The Jerusalem Post reported recently that aliyah had increased 31 percent over the preceding year, despite the obstacles created by COVID-19. A recent Shabbos guest mentioned that 32 families from one of the Bais Yaakovs in her “out of town” community made aliyah over the past summer.
And the United States will be only one source of that aliyah. Jews in Western Europe are under even more direct threat, in large part due to the large Muslim populations in their native countries. A 2018 report compiled by the European Fundamental Rights Agency found that just under 90 percent of the 16,000 Jews polled (a very large survey) felt that anti-Semitism had increased over the preceding year and 85 percent described it as a “very big or fairly big” problem. That EU study further revealed that of the most serious incidents of anti-Semitic harassment, 30 percent come from extremist Muslims, 21 percent from those on the left, and 13 percent from the right.
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