ISRAEL p Soviet Jews line up in Warsaw for the final leg of their journey to Israel. INA FRIEDMAN Special to The Jewish News A dded to the general gloom that has descended upon Israel since the Temple Mount in- cident last month is a grow- ing sense of doom about an issue that just a year ago was cause for great elation. As the first anniversary of the latest wave of Soviet immigration rolls around, feelings about it range from mild depression to near panic, depending on how closely one is following the details. Last winter Israelis were literally greeting the new Soviet newcomers with bouquets. Doctors, scien- tists, engineers all, they were expected to rein- vigorate the economy, revo- lutionize the work ethic, and — by attracting foreign in- vestment — transform Israel into a technological super- power: the Japan of the Mid- dle East. Today that whole glowing enterprise is stuck deep in the mud. The envisioned in- vestments have not mate- rialized and, far from saving the Israeli economy, the immigrants are beginning to look like a fearsome burden on it. Indeed, the statistics are staggering. No less than 142,000 immigrants (130,000 of them from the Soviet Union) entered Israel in the first ten months of 1990. That translates into a new resident joining the population every four-and-a- half minutes, with 200 more children entering the school system each day. To settle the one million Soviet Jews who are ex- pected to arrive over the next three to five years, Israel will have to scare up an additional $10 billion each year — and that in a country whose GNP is cur- rently less than $50 billion, whose foreign debt is al- ready $23 billion, and whose location in such a volatile part of the world is hardly a drawing card for investors or an assuring feature for for- eign banks. Israelis have been warned that higher taxes are on the way to help cover the costs of absorption, but most A House Of Cards Soviet Jews, still coming to Israel in record numbers, are optimistic about the future. But the economy can't take the strain. economists dismiss these hikes as a mere drop in the ocean — and no one seems to have a clue about where the money really will come from. Typically, the government and opposition have lapsed into trading recriminations about what some politicians are already calling the "impending fiasco." Squab- bling between the finance and housing ministers delayed the onset of con- struction for months, so that despite the influx of over 140,000 people, there were actually fewer building starts in the first 10 months of 1990 than in the same period of the previous year. Meanwhile, the rental market has virtually dried up, and in some places two and three families are crowding together in stan- dard four-room flats. One Galilean town has become so crowded with immigrants that the school system is buckling under the strain, and the mayor can no longer guarantee an adequate supply of drinking water — a sore subject, by the way, that is beginning to concern the population as a whole. Yet housing and an over- burdened infrastructure are only half the problem. It is the sore lack of jobs that The government and opposition have lapsed into trading recriminations about what some politicians are already calling the "impending fiasco." worries officials most. Even- tually apartments will get built, but without decent jobs the hundreds of thousands of immigrants will not qualify for mor- tgages to buy them. And neither will they provide the revenues to expand the country's school, sewage, electric, transport, and communications systems. The government carries the immigrants through their first year with a grant that averages $9,000. After that, they're on their own — which is why, in some min- istries, panic has now set in. The State Comptroller, a no- nonsense ex-Supreme Court judge, summed up the situa- tion in scoring the govern- ment for its "short- sightedness, inaction, and blunders" in dealing with the flood of immigration. What do the immigrants themselves have to say about this sad state of af- fairs? Unexpectedly, outside Jerusalem's Labor Exchange, the mood is strik- ingly upbeat, even among people who arrived a year ago and are now losing their government stipends. Immi- grants must regularly check in at the exchange to be kept abreast of available jobs. They duly turn up every week; the jobs do not. Yet there's an oddly carefree aura about most of these people. Even after a year, they continue to live in a bubble and are still more attuned to life in Russia than in Israel. They barely watch television. They cer- tainly don't read the Hebrew press, which offers an even more chilling picture of the situation than does the state-run electronic media. Above all, perhaps, they sense something which other Israelis fail to fathom: that life in this difficult, rough- and-tumble country is nevertheless far better and more conducive to hope than it could ever be in the hostile, stifling environment they've left behind. "I've never felt as good as I do here," says Jan Schneider, a 27-year-old electrical engineer who must vacate his flat and will lose his stipend in two weeks. "I'm able to breathe in this country," echoes Moisiev Lev, a 40- year-old economic historian whose prime prob- lem at the end of his first year in Israel is to find a new career, since the history he taught "isn't history, and the economics aren't econ- omics. "Sure there are problems," Mr. Lev is the first to admit, "but life here isn't a series of humiliations." And the problems can be dealt with one at a time. Mr. Schneider, for example, has taken a temporary job as a security guard that brings in $550 a month (the mean monthly income in Israel is $1,150), and he is confident that he will be able to squeak by until something better comes along. Mr. Lev is working as a moving man and is leaving Jerusalem for a nearby development town where rents are substantial- ly lower. Neither is put off THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS 45