1990s post-Soviet aliyah

In the years leading up to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 and for just over a decade thereafter, a particularly large number of Jews emigrated from the Soviet Union and the post-Soviet countries. The majority of these emigrants made Aliyah to Israel, while a sizable number immigrated to various countries in the Western world. This wave of Jewish migration followed the 1970s Soviet aliyah, which began after the Soviet government gave special permission to the country's Jewish refuseniks to emigrate. Between 1989 and 2006, about 1.6 million Soviet Jews and their relatives left the country. About 979,000, or 61%, were received by Israel under the Law of Return, which allows Jews and their non-Jewish spouses to relocate to Israel and acquire Israeli citizenship. Another 325,000 and 219,000 immigrated to the United States and Germany, respectively. Many of the Ashkenazi Jews who lived in all parts of the former Soviet Union were highly secular, and notable Jewish customs went unpracticed, such as a Brit milah (circumcision ceremony). Upon arriving to Israel, tens of thousands of teenage boys and men underwent circumcision. Among these Jews was also a significant amount of intermarriage; according to the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, 26% of olim and olot from the Soviet Union did not have their Jewishness recognized by the halakhic definition, but were still eligible for Israeli citizenship due to patrilineal Jewish descent or through marriage to a Jew. While most of the immigration wave was made up of Ashkenazi Jews, a notable number of Mizrahi Jews also made aliyah from the Soviet Union's Asian territories during this time, such as the Mountain Jews, the Georgian Jews, and the Bukharian Jews, among others. These Jewish communities were much more traditional and substantially less affected by Soviet secularism, maintaining a strong Jewish...