On November 22, 2023, Chantal and Nicky Young eventually closed their front door in London and boarded a flight to Israel.
The family was waiting for the arrival of Tel Aviv. But the person not there was Nasanel, the youngest of the five children.
The 20-year-old was murdered by Hamas on October 7th. Two years ago he made Aliya – the term Jewish immigration to Israel was translated as “ascendance,” serving the Israeli defence forces on the Gaza border.
“Nasanel’s dream was for us to make Aliya. He was looking for property for us,” his French-born mother, Chantal, told CNN.
When Nasanel was killed, the young people were planning their moves. “We were shocked,” said Chantal, 62. “I don’t say my son has passed away for a long time. I say, ‘He went on a trip.’
Nasanel’s grieving parents quickly decide to make his dream come true by moving forward with the day of travel.
The young man is one of the thousands of Jews who made Aliya in two years after the brutal Hamas-led attack. Some are motivated by the need to stand in solidarity with Israel, while others are motivated by their desire to find shelter from the rising anti-Semitism in their homeland.
However, the flow is not just in one direction. As Jews around the world moved to Israel, many Israelis left the country, settled elsewhere, realising that they were unable to live in an ongoing conflict, economic challenges and an increasingly polarized society.
The result is that, according to Sergio Delapergola, a demographicist and professor emeritus at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, spending his career studying immigration to Israel, a net immigration deficit that speaks to wider disorientation in the October 7, 2023 attack.
“Israel has always been a fundamentally immigrant nation,” he told CNN. However, in 2023, official statistics revealed that the immigration balance was a rarely seen “negative.” He mentioned data from the country’s Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS). Approximately 80,000 Israelis remained, with 15,000 that October alone. Around 25,000 people have since returned to Israel, but the country welcomed 30,000 new immigrants. The result was a net deficit of 25,000, Dellapergola said.
According to Dellapergola, these may sound like a huge number, but Israel is a small country with an overall population of over 10 million, of which 7.2 million are Jews.
CBS has released further data on the transition to Israel through September 2025. He says he will draw similar pictures for 2024.
“I wasn’t scared because the worst possible situation had already happened,” said Chantal, who left a life in England for a war country almost two years ago. “Every country has problems and it’s not a perfect country, but we feel it’s ours.”
Nikki, 65, who worked in customer service for many years, admitted that he was “more unsettling,” but added that “the support we had as a family in Israel is incredible and we are still reaching it.”
Rattenberg, 24, of Josheved, lives in Texas and was engaged in construction and sales when he heard the news of the attack on October 7th. “It didn’t work,” she told CNN. “I was like, ‘I need to be in Israel.’ ”
Two weeks later, she purchased 23 giant duffel bag supplies for those affected by the attack in 23 giant duffel bags with funds raised by her and her friends.
“Three days before my flight back, I called work and stopped,” she said. “I spent my whole life in Texas and couldn’t leave. I thought I needed to tailor volunteer opportunities to people all over the world. Everyone wanted to help.
Today, Rattenberg lives in Tel Aviv and runs a thriving organization with a community of 45,000 people interested in volunteering in Israel. She is still returning to the US, but she says she notices a change in mood there.
“I was very aware that the atmosphere had changed dramatically,” she said of her recent trip. “I was wearing my sweater with a big David star, and suddenly I was very aware that I wasn’t surrounded by people who supported Israel.”
Over the centuries there have been waves of Jewish migration driven primarily by persecution. The establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 may have been considered the end of wanderings, but some have questioned whether Jewish homelands are the perfect place for them.
Over the past two years, thousands of Israelis have chosen to move to a place where air raid sirens, terrorist attacks, forced military service and anti-government protests no longer feature in their daily lives.
However, Dellapergola’s analysis shows that many Israeli immigrants have embarked on new lives in Cyprus, Canada and Thailand, but few are ready to speak publicly, citing their distrust of media and fears about anti-Israel sentiment.
However, the exception was Neu Catzman, an Israeli student who was taking part in an internship in Leipzig, Germany when Hamas attacked. Among those killed was Catsman’s brother Hayme, an academic and peace activist who was murdered in Kibbutz Hollitt near Gaza.
Non-binary Katsman, 29, is currently applying for German citizenship – a country where his grandmother fled in the 1930s.
“I didn’t want to leave, but the political situation is impossible and there is an increasing number of discrimination against the left, activists and of course Palestinians,” Katsman told CNN.
“There were a lot of articles about my brother being a peace activist, and all the comments were very troublesome and he said he deserved it and was naive,” said Katsman, who spoke repeatedly to wars in international media, including CNN.
“It’s clear that the Israeli state is using our grief to cause grief, and I don’t want this. I think it’s terrible. They want to own our stories.”
Nevertheless, his relationship with Catsman has regularly visited and earned a Master’s degree in Culture and Gender Studies from an Open University in Israel.
“If there’s peace, I’ll come back tomorrow,” Catsman said. “If a conflict is put an end and people have justice and human rights, of course I want to go back. I love the land, I love people, I love culture, but I don’t love the nation.”
For others, seeing the rising anti-Semitism incidents in Europe and elsewhere, Israel feels like a safe haven. German Jewish journalist and author Mirna Funk, 44, applied to create Aliya with her daughter two months after October 7th. She told CNN that she had long warned in German media about rising anti-Semitism, but things have gotten dramatically worse.
“I’ve been observing this shift and I’ve been watching it for about 10 years, so I realized what I saw right after October 7th and it was going to get worse,” she said.
“I was suffering from death threats on a weekly level and didn’t feel safe. I didn’t want to be isolated in Jewish schools, but it became clear that she could no longer go to public schools.”
Although she still works in the German media, Funk currently lives in Jaffa, a city with a mixed Jewish and Arab population, and her daughter studies at a “coexistence school” where children from both backgrounds study each other. “Life is much more free,” she said.
Speaking to CNN, a demographic scientist at Hebrew University, he stressed that the situation is “very complicated” as Israel was rewritten by social divisions before October 7th, as the months of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, the most accurate source in Israel’s history, showed.
“We need to look at the present with a long-term vision and understand the mobility movement between Israel and Israel,” he said.
“The general image is that Aliya is fundamentally an ideological choice: people, their religion, their children’s future, and people who want to rejoin the pressure of anti-Semitism.”
This is true in some cases, but his research has led him to conclude that economic considerations are usually more important, he said. “It has been shown that the dominant engine of migration to Israel is the economic situation of the country of origin. If the situation is good in Israel, Israel is more attractive. Otherwise, it is not attractive,” he said.
Igal Palmer, head of international relations for Israel’s Jewish organization, which promotes Aliya, told CNN: Palmer said he had seen a decline in Aliya, but expected it to be “more marked.”
“Many people are reluctant to come at this point, but others feel the need to stand by us, become Israelis and contribute to the nation when it is most needed.”
Dellapergola sees the changing image of movement as part of the broader uncertainty that Jews around the world feel.
“Everyone is dissatisfied and terrified, and thinks there are good pastures somewhere else, but that’s not true. There is no spare duty on the West, no missiles or warnings. Meanwhile, you’re reading about the incredible anti-Semitic attacks in the Western countries,” he said.
“The Jews feel very confused.”
