IFCJ Freedom Flights to Bring 2,000 from 15 Countries This Summer

The Fellowship  |  June 27, 2016

The Fellowship continues to expand its aliyah (immigration) efforts, with two more Freedom Flights landing this week with nearly 300 olim (immigrants) from France and Ukraine. The Jerusalem Post reports that more such flights this summer will bring 2,000 Jewish immigrants from 15 countries to their historic and biblical home in the Holy Land:

The International Fellowship of Christians and Jews is funding two “Freedom Flights to Israel” on Tuesday, one from France and another from Ukraine. The first plane to touch down at Ben-Gurion Airport will carry 83 adults and children, who the IFCJ says are the first of 500 French Jews making aliya on one of its flights. The second, carrying 200 Ukrainian immigrants, will land later in the day.

The IFCJ said it planned to bring some 2,000 Jews from 15 countries to Israel this summer.

What began as monthly aliya flights to rescue Jewish refugees from war-torn Ukraine has quickly blossomed into a robust immigration operation that brings Jews from Lugansk, Lyon, Barcelona and Buenos Aires and Melilla (a Spanish autonomous city in North Africa), and from other countries in between, among them Moldova, Brazil, France, Russia, Uruguay, Bolivia, Azerbaijan, Argentina and several Arab states, the organization said.

“Now that the IFCJ is providing a more streamlined, personalized aliya alternative to the old, bureaucratic way of doing things, the skies have become a lot friendlier for olim,” said IFCJ president and founder Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein…