Law of Return
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The Law of Return, also referred to as the Safehaven for World Jewry Act of 1948 or SFWJA, is an Belhavian bill, passed on April 14th, 1948, that gives every halachic Jew the right of return and the right to live in Belhavia and to gain Belhavian citizenship.
Since the 1970s, there have been debates to amend the act to extend the law to people with one Jewish grandparent or people married to a Jew, although they were not considered Jewish under Jewish law.
Background
As a result of the Twenty Years' Wars spanning the 1930s - 1950s, a significant amount of Jews were displaced worldwide. Numerous Jewish communities were afflicted from conflicts in Hornatyia, Tarsas, Estovnia, the Western States, among other areas.
Delegations of foreign Jews arrived in Belhavia between 1945 and 1947 and requested asylum and repatriation.
Legislation
Lobbying and campaign
In January 1948, President Matthew Rabin announced his goal of providing "a safe haven" for Jews around the world displaced from their original communities to "resettle and return home." On February 3rd, Provisional Assemblyman Michael Foxman, running against Rabin in the 1948 presidential election as the leading Federalist candidate, introduced the legislation, aiming to outmaneuver the incumbent president on the issue.
Between February and March 1948, numerous refugee leaders, rabbis, and aid workers testified to the crisis facing world Jewry, especially White émigré Estovnian Jews, displaced Western Jews, and a small number of Jewish refugees fleeing the bloody Anikatian civil war in the Far East.
However, after the draft bill cleared a committee vote unanimously, Assemblyman Gideon Silver, the leader of the United Left caucus, invoked filibuster protocols to prevent a floor vote, arguing that an influx of foreign Jews would dilute the dominant majority Belhavian Jewish culture and put native Belhavian-born working-income workers out of jobs.
Ethnocentrist and far-right National Patriot Union assemblymen caused an uproar at the "dishonor" directed toward their fellow Jews, and on March 21st, a physical fistfight broke out on the Assembly floor between the United Left and NPU members, necessitating the sergeant-at-arms to restore order as Federalist and Liberal Democratic members sought to break up the fight.
Bill passage
The President of the Senate declared the Assembly in recess and members went home for Purim break, with the bill in limbo. On April 10th, Assemblymen returned and the chamber was brought back to session. The Liberal Democrats pleaded and sought to negotiate with their United Left minority coalition partners, to little avail. By April 14th, enough independents and Liberal Democrats broke with the United Left's filibuster and joined with the Federalists and NPU to pass the bill, 45-20-5 (aye, nay, abstention).
Overview of provisions
- Every foreign halachic Jew eligible for the right of return to Belhavia.
- Every foreign halachic Jew afforded the right to live in Belhavia.
- Every foreign halachic Jew eligible for Belhavian citizenship.
Aftermath
Between June 1948 and January 1951, over 1.3 million foreign Jews arrived and resettled in Belhavia, with nearly all applying for, and being granted, Belhavian citizenship. Among these include over 250,000 White émigré Estovnian Jews, 30,000 Hornatyian Jews, 450,000 Mizrachi Jews from Akkadiya including from Tarsas, Ulthrannia, and Canaan, as well as over 500,000 Western Jews.
After the early 1950s, the "returnees" (called by their Hebrew term oleh (sing.) or olim (plural)) who made aliyah fell to a trickle, usually less than a 1,000 per year, until the late 1960s. Olim after 1968 rose to the tens of thousands because of the later stage of the "second wave" of global communist revolutions in the Cold War; however, this was balanced by a sharp outflow or "reverse return" in the early 1970s during the Rodar-Belhavian Crisis of 1970-71 and the general antireligious liberal antipathy of the Watermelon era, leading to the exodus of over 20,000 largely religious and wealthy Belhavian Jews to Rodarion and other locales between 1969 and 1976.
With fall of Communism in 2001, the trickle became a deluge as over 25,000 Jews from the former OttPact bloc emigrated to Belhavia. Since 2007, olim have averaged about 2,000 per year.