Around 230 Jewish immigrants from Ukraine, including dozens of families fleeing the fighting in eastern Ukraine, arrived in Israel this week.
They are the first in an expected group of over 400 Ukrainians who will arrive before the end of the year. A second flight is scheduled to arrive on Dec. 30.
The flights are sponsored by the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews (IFCJ) with Israel’s Ministry of Immigration and Absorption in cooperation with the Jewish Agency for Israel.
5,134 new immigrants from Ukraine have arrived in Israel in 2014, a 174 percent increase over the previous year, according to Israeli Minister of Immigration and Absorption, Sofa Landver, who welcomed the new immigrants during a ceremony along with the chairman of the Jewish Agency, Natan Sharansky, and IFCJ’s founder and president, Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein.
Earlier this month Israel implemented special procedures to speed up the immigration process for Jewish people from Ukraine’s conflict zones.