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WHAT IS ALIYAH?

Aliyah is a Hebrew word that means “to go up.”  The term originally meant to go up to Jerusalem to celebrate the Jewish holidays or to go forward to read Torah portions at synagogue.  In modern Jewish history, aliyah has come to mean the act of returning to Israel, going up to the promised homeland of the Jewish people.

Since 1948, Israel has opened its doors to Jewish people dispersed across the globe.  Every Jewish person has the right to return to their biblical homeland and to become a full-fledged citizen immediately upon arrival.  More than 3 million olim—Jewish people making aliyah—have made Israel their home.  They have come from east and west, north and south, from rich countries and from poor, from persecution and from prosperity—all with a recognition of Israel as their home.

Dozens of times in the Scriptures, God speaks of regathering the Jewish people from wherever they have been scattered.  “‘The days are coming,’ declares the LORD, ‘when I will bring My people Israel and Judah back from captivity and restore them to the land I gave their forefathers to possess,’ says the LORD” (Jeremiah 30:3).  “I will take the Israelites out of the nations where they have gone.  I will gather them from all around and bring them back into their own land” (Ezekiel 37:21).

Aliyah shows all of us that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, has never forgotten His promises, and He never will.  He is bringing to pass His prophecy through Jeremiah over 2,500 years ago:  “People will no longer say, ‘As surely as the LORD lives, who brought the Israelites up out of Egypt,’ but they will say, ‘As surely as the LORD lives, who brought the descendants of Israel up out of the land of the north and out of all the countries where he had banished them.’ Then they will live in their own land” (Jeremiah 23:7-8).