“Sergey Brin and Larry Page . . . in
The answer came as soon as Sergey Brin spoke. “Ladies and gentlemen, girls and boys,” he said in Russian, his choice of language prompting spontaneous applause. “I emigrated from Russia when I was six,” Brin continued. “I went to the United States. Similar to you, I have standard Russian-Jewish parents. My dad is a math professor. They have a certain attitude about studies. And I think I can relate that here, because I was told that your school recently got seven out of the top ten places in a math competition throughout all Israel.”
This time the students clapped for their own achievement. “But what I have to say,” Brin continued, cutting through the applause, “is what my father would say—‘
Most of the students at the Shevach-Mofet school were, like Brin, second-generation Russian Jews. Shevach- Mofet is located in an industrial area in south Tel Aviv, the poorer part of town, and was for years notoriously one of the roughest schools in the city.
We learned about the history of the school from Natan Sharansky, the most famous former Soviet Jewish immigrant in Israel. He spent fourteen years in Soviet prisons and labor camps while fighting for the right to emigrate and was the best-known “refusenik,” as the Soviet Jews who were refused permission to emigrate were called. He rose to become Israel’s deputy prime minister a few years after he was freed from the Soviet Union. He joked to us that in Israel’s Russian immigrant party, which he founded soon after his arrival, politicians believe they should mirror his own experience: go to prison first and
“The name of the school—Shevach—means ‘praise,’ ” Sharansky told us in his home in Jerusalem. It was the second high school to open in Tel Aviv, when the city was brand-new, in 1946. It was one of the schools where the new generation of native Israelis went. But in the early 1960s, “the authorities started to experiment with integration, a bit like in America,” he explained. “The government said we can’t have sabra schools, we must bring in the immigrants from Morocco, Yemen, Eastern Europe—let’s have a mix.”6
While the idea may have been a good one, its execution was poor. By the beginning of the 1990s, when large waves of Russian Jewish immigrants began to arrive following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the school was one of the worst in the city and known mainly for delinquency. At that time, Yakov Mozganov, a new immigrant who had been a professor of mathematics in the Soviet Union, was employed at the school as a security guard. This was typical in those years: Russians with PhDs and engineering degrees were arriving in such overwhelming numbers that they could not find jobs in their fields, especially while they were still learning Hebrew.
Mozganov decided that he would start a night school for students of all ages—including adults—who wanted to learn more science or math, using the Shevach classrooms. He recruited other unemployed or underemployed Russian immigrants with advanced degrees to teach with him. They called it Mofet, a Hebrew acronym of the words for “mathematics,” “physics,” and “culture” that also means “excellence.” The Russian offshoot was such a success that it was eventually merged with the original school, which became Shevach-Mofet. The emphasis on hard sciences and on excellence was not in name only; it reflected the ethos that new arrivals from the former Soviet Union brought with them to Israel.
Israel’s economic miracle is due as much to immigration as to anything. At Israel’s founding in 1948, its population was 806,000. Today numbering 7.1 million people, the country has grown almost ninefold in sixty years. The population doubled in the first three years alone, completely overwhelming the new government. As one parliament member said at the time, if they had been working with a plan, they never would have absorbed so many people. Foreign-born citizens of Israel currently account for over one-third of the nation’s population, almost three times the ratio of foreigners to natives in the United States. Nine out of ten Jewish Israelis are either immigrants or first- or second-generation descendants of immigrants.
David McWilliams, an Irish economist who lived and worked in Israel in 1994, has his own colorful, if less- than-academic, methodology to illustrate immigration data: “Worldwide, you can tell how diverse the population is by the food smells of the streets and the choice of menus. In Israel, you can eat almost any specialty, from Yemenite to Russian, from real Mediterranean to bagels. Immigrants cook and that is precisely what wave after wave of poor Jews did when they arrived having been kicked out of Baghdad, Berlin, and Bosnia.”7
Israel is now home to more than seventy different nationalities and cultures. But the students Sergey Brin was addressing were from the single largest immigration wave in Israel’s history. Between 1990 and 2000, eight hundred thousand citizens of the former Soviet Union immigrated to Israel; the first half million poured in over the course of just a
