Young North American Jews move to Israel as citizens keep leaving

Some enlist in Israeli military through Mahal program dating to 1948

A small but distinct population of American Jews has moved to Israel since the war began, against the broader Israeli emigration tide. Aliyah — Hebrew for “ascent” — is the term for Jewish immigration to Israel. Under the country’s Law of Return, any Jew or person with a single Jewish grandparent is generally entitled to Israeli citizenship.

According to analysis by researchers at Tel Aviv University, nearly 270,000 Israeli citizens left the country between 2023 and 2025 — the highest three-year emigration total on record. The total runs roughly 50% higher than the same time frame a decade ago, draining doctors, engineers and Ph.D.s in what some Israeli lawmakers have called a tsunami. Countering that trend are young people who have spent the past three years doing the opposite: enlisting in the military, marrying and building lives in a country at war.

Nefesh B’Nefesh, the nonprofit that facilitates North American aliyah, says it is on pace for one of its strongest years since its 2002 founding, with more than 4,000 North Americans expected in 2026 at an average age of 29. A spokesperson for the U.S. State Department said the department cannot track with certainty how many Americans are in Israel.

Yocheved Ruttenberg grew up in Baltimore, went by “Kim,” and was selling roofing door-to-door in Texas when Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, near where her brother was stationed on an Israeli military base. Soon after, she flew to Tel Aviv to see him on what was supposed to be a short visit. But three days before her scheduled return flight to the U.S., Ruttenberg, 25, called her boss in Texas and quit. She co-founded a nonprofit, Sword of Iron Volunteer Network, which has since routed tens of thousands of volunteers into the country. She became a citizen last year, and this weekend she will marry a man who made the same move from London three years ago.

“I don’t speak Hebrew yet,” she said. “But I feel like it was always my home.”

While Ruttenberg arrived without enlistment plans, for others, it was the reason they came.

Myron Shneider said his mother gave him one rule when he flew from Boston to Israel on a Birthright trip in 2012 at age 19: Don’t be an idiot and join the military. He didn’t then, but a few years later, he joined a program called Mahal, which dates to Israel’s 1948 founding and addressed a shortage of skilled military personnel. It allows young diaspora Jews to serve without becoming citizens first. Shneider served 18 months, came home and built an ordinary American life. He had a going-away party on Oct. 6, 2023, before a move to Austin, Texas, for a new job. By the next afternoon, the scale of the Hamas attacks and subsequent war was becoming clear.

“I couldn’t sit on the sidelines,” he said. He pushed to get into a combat unit and made aliyah this time. “If I want anything to do with the military, you have to be Israeli for that,” he said. He has since logged nearly 500 days of reserve duty across Gaza, the West Bank and, last summer, the 12-day war with Iran. Shneider, 33, was recently let go from his corporate job in Tel Aviv. “Almost every single combat reservist I know has been hit in their career,” he said.

His situation highlights a broader strain. The Israeli military told the Knesset in 2025 that it was short roughly 12,000 soldiers, a gap most policy discussion has focused on closing through the country’s ultraorthodox population, which remains largely exempt from service. But some Israeli defense analysts have also proposed formalizing and expanding Mahal to recruit more volunteers like Shneider.

Recruiting Americans for a foreign military sits in a legal gray area. U.S. law bars foreign armed forces from recruiting on American soil, but the statute is rarely enforced. Some groups describe their U.S.-based work as facilitating immigration or volunteerism, not recruitment. Formal enlistment happens only after arrival in Israel.

Lior Yohanani, a sociologist at Tel Aviv University who studies diaspora military service, says the profile of recruits is shifting. Before Oct. 7, volunteers from overseas were often directionless young adults, perhaps unsure of what to study or coming off a breakup. But today’s arrivals skew more religious and ideologically driven, motivated by the war and rising antisemitism abroad.

American Jews have grown more divided on Israel since the Gaza war began. A recent Pew Research Center survey found that a majority have little or no confidence in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and many new arrivals avoid the armed forces.

Sara Serfaty, 25, grew up in New York with Moroccan Jewish parents and spent years resisting the idea that Israel could be home. A few years ago, she moved to Jerusalem for a master’s in Middle Eastern studies and now works at a think tank in Tel Aviv. “From the outside, there is a lot of idealization,” she said, particularly among people she calls “rah-rah Orthodox.” “I always tried to come with an open and critical eye.” She is building a life in Israel for cultural and professional opportunities, she says.

Julian Hirsch, 28, who is finishing a Ph.D. in archaeology at Hebrew University, made aliyah this year because his fieldwork doesn’t exist anywhere else at comparable scale. “It’s not a dream,” he said. “It’s just life.” Israeli higher education has expanded in parallel. International undergraduate enrollment at Israeli research universities roughly doubled between 2021-22 and 2023-24, according to a report from the Kohelet Policy Forum, a Jerusalem-based think tank. Several major research universities in Israel have opened or expanded English-language degree programs since the war began.

Older adults are making the shift, too. Eve Karlin was 38 when, last June, she quit her fitness job in Los Angeles to make aliyah. She had visited Israel before and considered retiring there, but Oct. 7 accelerated her timeline. “The feeling of me wanting to be in Israel just grew stronger,” she said. She landed hours before the war with Iran began. Missile shrapnel later fell a block and a half from her apartment. “You can feel the building shake,” she said. “You can hear the missile as it’s coming down.” She says she still has no doubt she made the right call. Karlin now documents her new life on Instagram, bad dates and air-raid sirens alike. Several followers have also since made the journey, she says.

Even those who return to the U.S. often remain closely tied to Israel. Yuval Padel, 22, came back to New York this year after two years of Israeli military service and started college at Touro University. By Israel’s Independence Day week in May, she found herself helping tour a group of Israeli reservists on a university campus for an event. She has since taken a job in Manhattan with Friends of the Israel Defense Forces, organizing the same soldier events and logistics she had once navigated herself. She calls her relationship with Israel “toxic,” the weight of a country that never quite lets go. One day, she hopes to move back there to raise a family.