Blowing the shofar upon arrival in Israel [file]. Photo: Nefesh B'Nefesh

However you count American Jewry - serious counts place the number at anywhere from 4.2 million to as many as 7.4 million - there is no doubt that an average aliya of 3,000 per year is insignificant in national or strategic terms.

The private aliya organization Nefesh B'Nefesh, which last week brought 238 olim to Israel from North America, hopes this aliya will rise above 4,000 for 2009, a figure it says will be driven by the economic recession in the US. But even then, aliya will count for less than 0.1 percent of the smallest estimate of American Jewry.

Nefesh B'Nefesh disputes these conclusions.

"You have to remember that only maybe 20% of American Jews have ever visited Israel," says Danny Oberman, executive vice president of Israel operations for Nefesh B'Nefesh. Thus, the potential aliya population is around 1 million, not 5 million.

Furthermore, "the average number of relatives directly affected by the 22,000 to 23,000 Americans who have made aliya since Nefesh started [in 2001] is between seven and 10," he says, suggesting that a little bit of growth in the short term is an investment that will translate into geometric growth in the near future.

Since most olim already have a relative in the country, the more olim there are, the more American Jews have relatives here.

But it's an open question if even these numbers reflect any kind of success story.

Hebrew University demographer Sergio DellaPergola, for example, says the Nefesh B'Nefesh figures include returning Israeli citizens and people making aliya after already living in Israel. The number of truly new immigrants hovers closer to 2,000 per year, according to Central Bureau of Statistics figures, he points out.

DellaPergola believes that American aliya is not growing any faster than aliya from other parts of the world. Despite the efforts of Nefesh, the Jewish Agency and others, he says, "the numbers from the US have been consistent with the numbers from other countries."

For advocates of aliya, this is particularly troubling, since the US Jewish community constitutes as much as 80% of the worldwide Jewish Diaspora, making it the last great "reservoir" of potential aliya.

BEFORE REACHING any conclusions, however, it is important to put this "failure" in context. Nefesh is trying mightily to do something that's never been done before.

As DellaPergola and others point out, no mass aliya has ever occurred without a driving disaster, whether political or natural. Throughout the history of political Zionism, masses of Jews were never pulled to Israel by pure idealism.

Indeed, the mass immigrations of the 20th century were driven by pogroms, expulsions, famines and outright genocides that emptied three continents of their millennia-old Jewish life. It is a sad truth that Zionism's near-universal acceptance among Jews flows from the fact that its worst fears and direst warnings have all come to pass.

Except, of course, in America. Only in the United States (and a handful of other smaller English-speaking communities), the story of the 20th century includes no organized murder, no expulsions and no famine.

The Americans, who make up over 90% of the English-speaking Jewish world, learned from American culture that identity is a matter of choice, that religious and political freedom is innate and universal. Theirs is the story of relatively minor discrimination that slowly dissolved into utter acceptance and widespread respect and admiration.

From a Harvard president who refused to accept Jews in the 1930s to a Jewish president of Harvard; from Jews growing up in Brooklyn without meeting a single non-Jew until they went to college, to "Jewish heritage" being one of many harmless aspects of one's wholly American identity - this is the story of American Jews.

THIS DIFFERENCE isn't for the history books alone; it explains some of the deepest differences between Israelis and Americans today, and between the Israeli and American notions of aliya.

To Israelis, "aliya" refers to waves of refugees fleeing a cruel world to take control of their destiny in a place where Jews are an indigenous nation. The vision of Israel as a free Jewish political space, a refuge and a voice for a people that had neither, informs Israeli Jewish identity in deep ways.

But Americans have no parallel memory of destruction, and no experience of sacrifice. They are five generations removed from the Czarist pogroms that drove so many Eastern European Jews to America's shores in the 19th century. Their Jewishness is a personal choice, as valid as many other chosen identities, and their national experience one of prosperity, freedom and social acceptance.

"Aliya" cannot mean the same thing in such radically different cultures.
Indeed, it doesn't.

DR. MARC ARKOVITZ, a pediatric surgeon from New York, is making aliya to become the next head of pediatrics at Rambam Hospital in Haifa.

"I think America is a great place," he says, trying to put into words his decision to leave, which included leaving a far more lucrative position, at New York's Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, than the one he will take up in the Jewish state.

"My father fought and was wounded in World War II in Europe fighting for a country he loved. I also love America. I'm not making aliya because [there will be] another Holocaust in America.

"But Israel is in my blood. I can't explain it. My love for Israel is not something I can neglect," Arkovitz says over the din of the engines of the Boeing 777 that brought him to Israel on Tuesday.

Aliya need not be universal, he adds.

"I want to see US Jews taking their Yiddishkeit [Jewishness] seriously and their Judaism seriously, so I don't think [American] rabbis who bring Jews closer to Judaism should make aliya, because they give American Jews their identity," he says.

Also on the plane are Sherilyn and Josef Mandelbaum of Cleveland, the latter a top executive in the American Greetings greeting card company who plans to keep his job and telecommute from Israel.