New Entrepreneurs in Israel: “Adventures” of the Integration of the Soviet Jews

• Main Author: William Berthomière
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Institute for Migration and Ethnic Studies 2000-09-01
• Series: Migracijske i Etniĉke Teme
• Subjects: migration; integration; entrepreneurs; Soviet Jews; Former Soviet Union; Israel
• Online Access: http://hrcak.srce.hr/file/159548

Following the collapse of the Soviet block, more than 800,000 FSU Jews emigrated to Israel, the only true host country. This new migration constituted a real challenge of integration for Israel: how to provide employment for this massive wave of working population? The Israeli government faced two major obstacles. First, the FSU immigrants were composed, to a great extent, of very qualified people, even highly qualified than the structure of the Israeli labour market was unable to incorporate. The Israeli labour market was oriented to qualified workers (e.g. for the building sector) whereas the migratory wave brought many engineers, teachers, doctors and high-level scientists. In a second point of view, these highly qualified migrants were all the more difficult to integrate that in addition to the structural obstacles existed a true inadequacy between the qualifications held by the immigrants and those needed by the Israeli employers. These difficulties of employment led the FSU Jews to accept non-qualified jobs, which generated a strong loss of social status for most of them. Faced with these problems and moved by the refusal to accept a non-qualified employment any longer, a growing number of ex-Soviets decided to create their own company. It is this “adventure” of the integration of the FSU Jews in Israel that we sought to clarify. The observations and analysis suggested in this article are the result of about thirty talks realized with several new Israeli entrepreneurs from the FSU. With these investigations we tried to outline the various motivations underlying these initiatives. Three great types of motivations, reflecting the different perceptions of the professional integration in the migrant group, were underlined: the company as a “last chance” of integration, the Soviet community as an entrepreneurial niche and the entrepreneurial activity as a way to personal achievement. With these three ways of analyses, this article tried to sketch a process of professional adaptation that interests more than 7 000 FSU immigrants today.