Russian language in Israel

The Russian language is spoken natively by a considerable proportion of the population of Israel, mostly by immigrants who came from the former Soviet Union from 1989 onwards.

Government institutions and businesses often also provide information and services in Russian, and has effectively become semi-official in some areas with high concentration of Russian-speaking immigrants.

Most of them were from Georgia; the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania; and areas annexed by the Red Army in 1939–1940 from Poland and Romania.

[12] Less than half of those who emigrated in the 1970s wave came from Slavic countries, i. e., Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Poland even though about 80% of Soviet Jews lived there at the time.

The wave of immigration in this short period of time was the greatest influx of people to Israel since the date of its creation.

[15] Ashdod, the sixth-largest city in Israel, absorbed a particularly large number of immigrants, accepting over 100,000 Soviet Jews from 1990 to 2001.

[20] The Yud-Yud Gimmel neighborhoods in southern Ashdod, where immigrants account for 75 percent of the population of 26,000, were dubbed "Israel's Russian ghetto".

[21] The process of integration into mainstream Israeli society is slow, because many Russian-speaking adults prefer to not learn Hebrew and are reluctant to give up their Russian cultural background.

[24] The Russian-speaking adult population, which is less competitive in Hebrew than the youth, mostly tries to preserve the common Russian cultural background, teaching it to their children born in Israel.

[6] Political scientist Ze'ev Khanin opined, "The Russian-speaking community is identifiable, but it is part of the Israeli collective.

[26][27][28] Ze'ev Khanin surmised that Russian Jews in Israel tend to be politically conservative, estimating that 50 to 60 percent supported the Likud Beiteinu coalition.

[26] Israeli journalist Lily Galili attributed this to being in part due to an unwillingness to make land concessions for the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

Russian and a number of other immigrant languages are widely used in Israel, because ethnic Jews from dozens of countries from all around the world have settled in the area.

[14] Although Russian is the native language of a significant part of the country's population, it occupies a modest role in Israel's education system.

[31] In the 2000s, the number of Russian-language newspapers started to decline due to the increasing influence of television and online media.