New Immigrants for Haifa?

Last week saw a visit from a representative of Nefesh B’Nefesh (NB’N) http://nbn.org.il/index.php to the local Haifa council. NB’N is an organization helping those families and individuals planning to settle in Israel get through their planning and on arrival, the initial inevitable beaurocracy that surrounds all immigrants.

The organization has been very successful in bringing people from the USA, Britain and Canada; however as one living in Haifa, it seems to me that the limit of the vision of NB’N seems to end in Netanya with not much idea of what exists north of there.

The meeting with the local council and members of the Anglo community aimed to get NB’N to focus more on the North of the country. As the Mayor of Haifa put it, “Without settlement of new immigrants in the North of the country, we are de facto returning to the borders defined in the original partition plan.”

There was the opportunity to see how many jobs are available in the fields of High Tec and in the local hospitals. NB’N informed the meetings that they had 20,000 potential immigrants in the pipeline. Let’s hope a few thousand of those reach the North instead of the English speaking enclaves in Netanya, Tel Aviv, Bet Shemesh and Modi’in