Aliyah, First

Aliyah refers to Jewish immigration to Greater Israel.

Mass return to the Land of Israel is a recurring theme in Jewish prayers recited every day, three times a day, and holiday services on Passover and Yom Kippur traditionally conclude with the words "Next year in Jerusalem."

For generations, however, aliyah had been associated with the coming of the Jewish Messiah.

Jews prayed for their Messiah to come, who was to redeem the Land of Israel from gentile rule and return world Jewry to the land under a Halachic theocracy.In Zionist discourse, the term aliyah (plural aliyot) includes both voluntary immigration for ideological, emotional, or practical reasons and, on the other hand, mass flight of persecuted populations of Jews.

According to the traditional Jewish ordering of books of the Bible, the very last word of the Bible (i.e.

the last word in the original Hebrew of verse 2 Chronicles 36:23) is veya`al, a "jussive" verb form derived from the same root as aliyah, meaning "let him go up" (to Israel).In Zionist history, the different waves of aliyah, beginning with the arrival of the Biluim from Russia in 1882, are categorized by date and the country of origin of the immigrants.

Bilu, an acronym based on a verse from the Book of Isaiah (2:5) "Beit Ya'akov Lekhu Ve-nelkha" ("House of Jacob, let us go [up]"), is a group of Jewish idealists aspiring to settle in Palestine with the political purpose to redeem Eretz Yisrael and reestablish the Jewish State on it.The wave of pogroms of 1881-1884 and anti-Semitic "May Laws" of 1882 introduced by Tsar Alexander III of Russia prompt mass emigration of Jews from the Russian Empire.

More than 2 million Jews flee Russia between 1880 and 1920.

Vast majority of them emigrate to the United States, but some decided to make aliyah.Between 1882 and 1903, approximately 35,000 Jews immigrate to Palestine, at this time a province of the Ottoman Empire.

The majority, belonging to the Hovevei Zion and Bilu movements, come from the Russian Empire with a smaller number arriving from Yemen.

Many establish agricultural communities.

Among the towns that these individuals establish are Petah Tikva (already in 1878), Rishon LeZion, Rosh Pina, and Zikhron Ya'aqov.

In 1882, the Yemenite Jews settle in an Arab suburb of Jerusalem called Silwan, located southeast of the walls of the Old City on the slopes of the Mount of Olives.

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