Israel has stopped emergency repatriation for citizens of Russia and Belarus who arrived after April 15. VPost writes about this, citing several local lawyers. According to the publication, the decision was made by internal order of the Ministry of Aliyah and Integration. The Israeli lawyer Alexei Kovalenko also confirmed the information to RTVI.
Emergency repatriation allows you to obtain the status of a repatriate in Israel, bypassing the stage of consular verification in the country of origin. A citizen could fly to Israel as a tourist and declare a desire to stay in the country. According to the new rules, those who managed to enter Israel before April 15 can change the status of a tourist to a repatriate until June 15. However, those who arrived after April 15 must go through the standard procedure, which was until February 2022. Also, from May 1, it is mandatory to apostille all documents issued since 1998, receive and apostille certificates of good conduct, marital status, lawyer Alex Zernopolsky said .
In total, more than 70 thousand people repatriated to Israel in 2022. That's more than double what it was a year ago, and the highest it's been in two decades. The Times wrote that between 165,000 and 200,000 Jews live in Russia. Thus, in 2022, every seventh or eighth Jew repatriated from Russia to Israel. In Russia, the Jewish Agency Sokhnut helped the repatriates; in July, the Moscow department of the Ministry of Justice demanded that its branch be liquidated. The former chief rabbi of Moscow and president of the Conference of European Rabbis, Pinchas Goldschmidt, said that it was the mass repatriation of Jews that caused the pressure of the Russian authorities on the Sokhnut agency.
