Ruth Eglash and Amir Mizroch

In an hour-long interview in her office in Jerusalem, Immigrant Absorption Minister Sofa Landver gets angry only once; only once, but very, very angry.

The usually self-composed Landver, herself an immigrant from the FSU, lets rip at the widespread belief amongst veteran Israelis that while new immigrants are vital to this country, 73 percent of the people surveyed said they believe that immigration caused a rise in crime and youth alcoholism. When asked which population people would most like to have as neighbors, veteran Israelis came in first, followed by new immigrants from the United States, immigrants from France, immigrants from the Former Soviet Union and lastly immigrants from Ethiopia. The same results were found when people were asked which population they would be happy to have their children in the class with and also who they would like their children to marry.

“We are racist. Israel is a very racist society. I know what olim have gone through over the past 20 years. Our nation does not know how to receive new immigrants,” Landver tells The Jerusalem Post in a wide-ranging interview ahead of next week’s Ashdod Conference on Immigration and Absorption. The main topics to be discussed will be “Racism in the Israeli Society,” “The Immigrant Youth Crisis” and “Absorption Economics – government policies versus implementation.”

“Veteran Israelis say that if our parents or grandparents suffered then anyone who gets to the country now should suffer too. But why? Why do olim have to go through this? Our society needs to change,” Landver asks.

But Landver is also facing heat from immigrants themselves, many of whom feel the game is rigged against them, that they will never fully integrate into Israeli society; and who daily face a tough, exhausting, and sometimes infuriating absorption process. The problems range from access to services, housing, employment, integration, conversion, and many others.

When it comes to the thorny issue of strict conversion rules which leave hundreds of thousands of Russian olim feeling isolated from their new state, Landver recalls the line drawn in the sand by her party boss, Israel Beitenu’s Avigdor Lieberman, that unless a solution is found to the civil union issue within 15 months of the government’s establishment, Israel Beitenu will leave the coalition.

“We plan to do what we threatened to do in the beginning. We threatened that if there was not a solution to the civil union dilemma we would carry out our threat [to leave the coalition],” she says resolutely, but adds that the solution might be that civil union legislation could happen in stages, in gradual steps.
At the beginning of the current government, Landver’s ministry dropped the ball on the issue of professional retraining for immigrants when it withdrew funding for some 4,500 retraining vouchers, leaving thousands of olim without a means to effectively enter the Israeli job market. Many immigrants simply showed up at their retraining institutions only to be told that there was no funding for their participation. The problem, according to Landver, was the government-wide budget cuts early on in the Netanyahu administration. “We were guaranteed an annual budget of NIS 1.5 billion. Israel Beitenu accepted the cutbacks, but then we were cut by 4%. About NIS 170m was cut from our budget. This created a coalition crisis, and eventually the cuts were retracted. All the vouchers have now been reinstated,” Landver says.

About NIS 400m of the ministry’s budget goes to pay for rental assistance for new immigrants in the low-income bracket. “This is a waste of money. I believe that the state should build public housing,” says Landver. The ministry has numbers which indicate that only a quarter of needy, elderly new immigrants receive public housing, a situation which Landver calls “a catastrophe”.

“Right now we have carried out a survey and found that the number of elderly people who have no housing options is very high. There are tens of thousands of them. They end up living well below the poverty line,” she says.

The government has not built new public housing for the past 25 years and many of those that exist need to be renovated. The eligibility requirements are also very strict and in most cases they are only given to big families. New immigrants mostly only have one or two children and so many are not eligible. There isn’t much Landver can do about this, but she is in talks with Housing Minister Ariel Attias, who himself faces pressure from his Shas constituents to build more affordable housing. The very few public housing options available for the ministry of immigrant absorption are in the Krayot district of Haifa, Afula, Dimona, and Sderot. “But the apartments are in slums, and their condition was horrific. The situation is catastrophic. We started a campaign, and within one month received 12,000 requests for public housing, and we only have 500 apartments,” she says. Those numbers tell the story of just how desperate some immigrants are for housing assistance. The numbers are vastly higher when one factors in low-income immigrants who have lived here for more than ten years, and are no longer eligible for absorption ministry housing assistance, and who now fall under housing ministry criteria, which are much stricter. “For many of these people there is no future in this country. The housing ministry only starts giving you assistance if you have over a certain number of children. Most immigrant families are relatively small,” Landver says.

Hebrew-language Ulpanim are another problem area for the ministry, with several well-known Ulpanim closing down recently, and the fate of others hanging in the balance. The problem, as always is money and politics. The absorption ministry wants the Ulpanim under its wing, but doesn’t have the money. The Education Ministry, which is responsible for Ulpanim, don’t place adequate focus on these institutions, vital to the absorption of new immigrants, preferring instead to allocate their meager funds elsewhere.

“It is clear that there is a problem here. When a new immigrant finishes ulpan without an adequate vocabulary then we know that there needs to be a change,” says Landver, adding that her ministry is working on a solution to save ulpanim, without revealing what that solution is.

Landver believes that the way a country treats new immigrants in their first few years very much determines their attitude to the country and colors their integration. No wonder the issue of bureaucracy keeps on coming up again and again. Regular readers of The Jerusalem Post will have noticed a steady stream of stories about the maddening bureaucracy that oftentimes makes immigrants wish they could take back that kiss on the Ben Gurion Airport tarmac and get back on the plane to “a country that works”.

“There is no bureaucracy here. We provide service with a smile,” Landver says of her ministry, and its various branches countrywide.

“I would like to believe that today there is not one oleh that does not received service from us with a smile or does not get the answer they need. If someone makes aliya and does not contact us then eventually we track them down and offer them our services. We speak all languages in the Absorption Ministry; if someone turns to us they get an answer in any language they want,” Landver asserts.

On the issue of Anglo olim, Landver says that while she sees no difference between any new immigrants, “we do recognize that English speakers come from stronger countries. They come with pensions and savings and maybe they feel that they need us less.”

“When I first arrived to Israel I was also a new immigrant. I know how difficult it can be and how hard it is to fit in. Moving from place to place can be very difficult for a person until he learns the language and the culture. I hate bureaucracy and hate when people don’t give direct or immediate answers. I hate it. We want immigrants to get five-star service,” she concludes.