Russian-speaking Israelis
Who the immigrants from the former Soviet Union and their children are, how their towns have voted since 2019, and what little is known of their views.
Yisrael Beiteinu's share of valid votes cast at ballot boxes in each locality, computed from the Central Elections Committee's locality results files for the 21st to 25th Knesset.
- Nof HaGalil
- Karmiel
- Kiryat Yam
- Bat Yam
- Ashdod
- Haifa
- Israel (all locality ballot boxes)
The numbers: How these towns voted: Yisrael Beiteinu's share of the vote, 2019–2022
| Locality | Apr 2019 | Sep 2019 | Mar 2020 | Mar 2021 | Nov 2022 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nof HaGalil | 20.8% | 22.7% | 20.1% | 18.1% | 15.1% |
| Karmiel | 16.3% | 23.8% | 20.9% | 18.0% | 14.2% |
| Kiryat Yam | 16.7% | 21.7% | 19.8% | 17.7% | 14.6% |
| Bat Yam | 12.5% | 18.0% | 16.8% | 15.2% | 11.1% |
| Ashdod | 12.4% | 18.0% | 16.5% | 13.2% | 10.4% |
| Haifa | 7.3% | 11.9% | 10.3% | 9.3% | 8.1% |
| Israel (all locality ballot boxes) | 4.0% | 7.0% | 5.7% | 5.6% | 4.5% |
Source: Central Elections Committee, locality results (computed), April 2019 – November 2022. These are whole-town results, not the vote of Russian speakers: every town listed is mixed, and Nof HaGalil and Haifa have large Arab populations. Double-envelope votes (soldiers, hospital patients, diplomats) are counted separately by the CEC and are not included. Yisrael Beiteinu ran under its own name in all five elections. Files for earlier elections: media21 to media24.bechirot.gov.il/files/expc.csv.
See Nof HaGalil on the vote map: Yisrael Beiteinu (15.1%), Nov 2022
Facts checked October 5, 2026. Every number shows its source and date.
Size, growth and geography
How many Russian-speaking Israelis there are depends on who is counted. About 1.25 million people came from the Soviet Union and its successor states between 1989 and mid-2023, about 13% of Israel's population and about 17% of its Jews (Ze'ev Khanin, Riddle, August 2023). Khanin puts the share of them who later left Israel again at about 14%. A December 2025 Jerusalem Post report put the number of eligible voters who immigrated from the former Soviet Union at "around one million" (JPost, December 2025).
Fewer people choose the label when asked. Asked their ethnicity in the Israel Democracy Institute's 2025 Democracy Index, 5.3% of Jewish respondents chose "FSU immigrant" (IDI, 2025).
Who is Jewish. Immigration runs under the Law of Return, which admits the grandchildren of Jews; the Chief Rabbinate counts only those Jewish under halacha. More than 300,000 of the 1989–2019 arrivals were registered as non-Jews (Khanin, 2023); a 2019 estimate put about 400,000 people in Israel, most from the former Soviet Union, as not recognized as Jewish by the Rabbinate (Times of Israel, January 2019). With no civil marriage in Israel, they cannot marry in a state-sanctioned wedding. Their share of each year's arrivals has risen steeply.
Immigrants from the former Soviet Union who were not Jewish under religious law, as a share of that year's arrivals.
Source: Knesset Research and Information Center, reported by the Times of Israel, 2022-11-17. The Law of Return's grandchild clause grants citizenship to anyone with at least one Jewish grandparent who does not practice another religion (Times of Israel). No total for the 2022–25 arrivals was found.
The 2022–25 arrivals. After Russia invaded Ukraine, more than 47,000 people came from Russia and 15,500 from Ukraine between February 2022 and June 2023; those from Russia alone were almost two-thirds of all new citizens in that period (Khanin, 2023). Arrivals from Russia fell from 19,535 in 2024 to 8,553 in 2025 (Jewish Virtual Library, September 2026). Many are thinking of leaving: in an April 2025 survey of immigrants from the former Soviet Union who arrived from 2014 to 2025, about 60% said they were considering moving to another country, 77% of those aged 18–34, against about a quarter of all Jews (IDI, fieldwork April 2025, published December 2025).
Where and how old. The Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) locality tables could not be reached for this page, so no town-by-town share of immigrants is given here. One CBS figure touches on age: people born in the former USSR are 35.8% of the Holocaust survivors living in Israel (CBS, May 2024).
How their towns have voted
Election results are reported by place, not by origin, so the tables below show six whole towns where Avigdor Liberman's Yisrael Beiteinu has run well above its national share. Khanin describes it as a party whose voters, like Liberman himself, came from the former Soviet Union (Khanin, 2023). They show how these towns voted, not how Russian speakers voted.
Three things stand out. Yisrael Beiteinu peaked in all six towns in September 2019, the election in which it won eight seats; by March 2020 Liberman was refusing to join a coalition with Shas and United Torah Judaism, the Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) allies of Likud (France 24, March 2020). It has fallen in every one of these towns at each election since. And by 2022 it was below its April 2019 level in five of the six towns (Haifa is the exception, 8.1% against 7.3%), while its national share was higher than in April 2019: 4.5% against 4.0% (CEC, computed).
Likud's share of valid votes cast at ballot boxes in each locality, computed from the Central Elections Committee's locality results files for the 21st to 25th Knesset.
- Nof HaGalil
- Karmiel
- Kiryat Yam
- Bat Yam
- Ashdod
- Haifa
- Israel (all locality ballot boxes)
The numbers: How these towns voted: Likud's share of the vote, 2019–2022
| Locality | Apr 2019 | Sep 2019 | Mar 2020 | Mar 2021 | Nov 2022 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nof HaGalil | 29.9% | 30.0% | 33.6% | 29.6% | 27.9% |
| Karmiel | 32.5% | 31.1% | 36.4% | 28.6% | 29.4% |
| Kiryat Yam | 42.0% | 42.1% | 48.2% | 41.1% | 40.5% |
| Bat Yam | 38.5% | 37.7% | 42.8% | 35.8% | 35.7% |
| Ashdod | 33.9% | 31.2% | 36.6% | 30.7% | 28.9% |
| Haifa | 23.7% | 23.3% | 26.6% | 21.4% | 20.9% |
| Israel (all locality ballot boxes) | 26.5% | 25.1% | 29.5% | 24.2% | 23.4% |
Source: Central Elections Committee, locality results (computed), April 2019 – November 2022. Whole-town results in mixed towns, not the vote of Russian speakers. Double-envelope votes are not included. Likud ran under its own name in all five elections.
Likud did not pick up what Yisrael Beiteinu lost. Its share in these towns peaked in 2020 and in 2022 was below its April 2019 level in all six. In Nof HaGalil, Arab parties took 25.6% of the 2022 vote (CEC, computed). Turnout in several of these towns was far below the national figure.
Votes cast as a share of registered voters, by locality.
Source: Central Elections Committee, locality results (computed), 2022-11-01. Whole-town figures in mixed towns. Nof HaGalil and Haifa also have large Arab populations, so these numbers are not the turnout of Russian speakers.
Estimates of the group's own vote, list by list, exist only to April 2019; for 2022 there is only a bloc estimate.
Share of the vote of immigrants from the former Soviet Union, as estimated by Zeev Hanin of Bar-Ilan University.
| Election | Yisrael Beiteinu | Likud | Next-largest list |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2015 | 42% | 29% | Zionist Union (Labor) 6.3% |
| April 2019 | 40.2% | 26.7% | Blue and White 15.1% |
Strongest shade: 50%. Source: Zeev Hanin, cited by the Times of Israel, 2019-07-26. An academic estimate, not a count. In 2015 Labor ran on the joint Zionist Union list with Hatnuah; the source calls it Labor. Blue and White is the list as it ran in April 2019. Hanin is the same scholar spelled Khanin in the page text. No comparable estimate was found for September 2019, 2020, 2021 or 2022.
For 2022, Khanin estimated that the Netanyahu bloc took "no more than one-third" of the Russian-speaking vote (Khanin, 2023). In a poll of 663 immigrants from the former Soviet Union published in December 2025, 23% chose Yisrael Beiteinu and 17% Naftali Bennett, and 69% said they did not want Benjamin Netanyahu to continue as prime minister (Lazar Research, for a study led by former Yisrael Beiteinu MK Elina Bardach-Yalov at the Jerusalem Multidisciplinary College, via JPost, December 2025). Nationally, Yisrael Beiteinu stood at 6 to 10 seats in late-August 2026 polls (Wikipedia polling table, to August 31, 2026). No 2026 vote poll of Russian speakers was found.
What they think on the issues
No survey published in 2026 breaks out Russian speakers on any of the issues, and the major surveys (IDI, INSS, INES) publish no breakdown by Soviet origin after 2022. The one recent source is the Lazar poll above (published December 2025; fieldwork date and question wording not published), the only poll of this group found.
- Haredi draft. 94% support a mandatory draft law for all citizens, "with almost no difference between political camps" (Lazar, December 2025). On the draft of Haredi yeshiva students, see the Haredi draft.
- Courts. No group data.
- War and hostages. No group data on the war or the hostages. 56% said they were concerned about personal and national security (Lazar).
- West Bank. No group survey. Khanin describes the community as still belonging to the right-wing camp and backing Israel's Jewish identity in its ethno-national sense (Khanin, 2023).
- Religion and state. No survey of this group on civil marriage was found. The related fact is the one above: hundreds of thousands of citizens not recognized as Jewish by the Rabbinate cannot marry in a state-sanctioned wedding in Israel. The only older data point: 55% of first-generation immigrants from the former Soviet Union said they believe in God, against 70% of the second generation (Pew, fieldwork 2014–15, the only source). See religion and state.
- Economy. 68% named the cost of living as their main concern, 74% were dissatisfied with the government's monetary policy and 72% with the country's direction (Lazar).
Who they are
Those who came as children, the "1.5 generation," are moving from being guests in a host society to acting as hosts themselves (Lily Galili, Brookings, September 2020). Liberman, who was born in the Soviet Union, again heads Yisrael Beiteinu's list in 2026 (Times of Israel, September 2026).
Israeli politicians have finally realized they have to address one million [voters] who have been here for 30 years, so they speak to them in Russian and give a toast on Novy God.
Who counts as a Jew remains contested. In November 2022, Likud MK Shlomo Karhi said the grandchild clause had "brought 'comfort' migrants here under the guise of Judaism." MK Yoel Razvozov replied that such reports "besmirched a population of a million people, including soldiers, police officers, teachers, engineers, doctors and others" (Times of Israel, November 2022).
Judaism doesn't belong to you. It belongs to all of us. You won't revoke the 'Law of Return,' you won't stop immigration, and you won't turn hundreds of thousands of Israelis into third-class citizens.
No interview with an ordinary member of the community since October 7, 2023 was found for this page.