In honor of the upcoming Women’s Day, Israel revealed on Sunday that the majority of immigrants who have arrived in the country over the past decade were women.
According to Aliyah and Integration Ministry data, 134,773 women immigrated to Israel in the last decade which makes up 52% of all who entered the state in that period.
Most newcomers were aged 18-35 when they arrived and there were over 15,000 women over 66 years.
2019 was the most advanced year for women’s immigration into Israel, with 18,161 new arrivals.
The majority of single female immigrants upon arrival in Israel were looking to find love in the Holy Land and 56,194 of them were married.
There are approximately 8,000 new female immigrants working in health care and allied health professions, 2,340 were artists and athletes and 363 were employed in agriculture and animal-assisted medicine.
The lion’s share of female immigrants to Israel came from Russia, with 37,613 new entrants, followed by Ukraine with about 25,000, France with more than 20,000 and the United States with about on 17,000 new entrants.
One woman even emigrated from Qatar to Israel in the past decade.
Tel Aviv-Jaffa became home to the largest number of women in the last decade when 15,884 of them settled in Israel’s financial center, followed by Netanya with 13,113 and Jerusalem with 12,935 new residents.
Aliyah and Integration Minister Pnina Tamano-Shata, who arrived in Israel from Ethiopia in the mid-80s as part of Operation Moses, congratulated the new women who arrived in the country.
“Women in new countries have high rates of change and so it is a recurring theme in immigration studies, also in our case,” Tamano-Shata said. “Even now, as the founding of the state, immigrant women have played a part in establishing and building the state of Israel.
“I am delighted to see so many women migrating into Israel and I am delighted to be in charge of a ministry that 80% of their workforce is women, the ministry with the most female representation. Happy Women’s Day Week. “