By Stan Goodenough
Dec 17, 2006
Thousands of Jews from the USA, Canada and England, responded to the urge to return to their biblical homeland in 2006.
While the overall annual aliyah (immigration) numbers were down, the number of British immigrants soared more than 25 percent over last year; while North America saw an 11 percent rise.
Tens of thousands of Jews make aliyah to Israel from around the world every year. Since 1880, successive waves of Jewish immigration have occurred in direct fulfillment of what the prophets of Israel foretold two-and-a-half millennia ago.
The restoration of the Jewish people to their land is perhaps most dramatically forecast in the 37th chapter of the Book of Ezekiel, where this process is compared to the coming together of dried out bones and their reconstitution into living human beings.
In recent years Israel has come to boast the largest Jewish population of any country in the world, well on the way to six million – the number of Jews (at least) killed by the Nazis just 64 years ago.
Israel’s Jews have come back from over 100 different nations and are working to rebuild the homeland Rome drove their forefathers out of in AD 70 and 135.