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 then get into politics, not the other way around.
“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 three-year period. All together, it amounted to adding about a fifth of Israel’s population by the end of the 1990s. The U.S. equivalent would be a flood of sixty-two million immigrants and refugees coming to America over the next decade.
“For us in the Soviet Union,” Sharansky explained, “we received with our mothers’ milk the knowledge that because you are a Jew—which had no positive meaning to us then, only that we were victims of anti-Semitism—you had to be exceptional in your profession, whether it was chess, music, mathematics, medicine, or ballet. . . . That was the only way to build some kind of protection for yourself, because you would always be starting from behind.”
The result was that though Jews made up only about 2 percent of the Soviet population, they counted for “some thirty percent of the doctors, twenty percent of the engineers, and so on,” Sharansky told us.
This was the ethos Sergey Brin absorbed from his Russian parents, and the source of the same competitive streak that Brin recognized in the young Israeli students. And it gives an inkling of the nature of the human resource that Israel received when the Soviet floodgates were opened in 1990.
It was a challenge to figure out what to do with an immigrant influx that, although talented, faced significant language and cultural barriers. Plus, the educated elite of a country the size of the Soviet Union would not easily fit into a country as small as Israel. Before this mass immigration, Israel already had among the highest number of doctors per capita in the world. Even if there had not been a glut, the Soviet doctors would have had a difficult adjustment to a new medical system, a new language, and an entirely new culture. The same was true in many other professions.
Though the Israeli government struggled to find jobs and build housing for the new arrivals, the Russians could not have arrived at a more opportune time. The international tech boom was picking up speed in the mid-1990s, and Israel’s private technology sector became hungry for engineers.
Walk into an Israeli technology start-up or a big R&D center in Israel today and you’ll likely overhear workers speaking Russian. The drive for excellence that pervades Shevach-Mofet, and that is so prevalent among this wave of immigrants, ripples throughout Israel’s technology sector.
But it was not just an obsession with education that characterized the Jews who arrived in Israel, from wherever they came. If education was the only factor explaining Israel’s orientation toward entrepreneurialism and technology, then other countries where students perform competitively on math and science standardized tests—such as Singapore—would be start-up incubators as well.
What the Soviet émigrés brought with them is symptomatic of what Israeli venture capitalist Erel Margalit believes can be found in a number of dynamic economies. “Ask yourself, why is it happening here?” he said of the Israeli tech boom. We were sitting in a trendy Jerusalem restaurant he owns, next to a complex he built that houses his venture fund and a stable of start-ups. “Why is it happening on the East Coast or the West Coast of the United States? A lot of it has to do with immigrant societies. In France, if you are from a very established family, and you work in an established pharmaceutical company, for example, and you have a big office and perks and a secretary and all that, would you get up and leave and risk everything to create something new? You wouldn’t. You’re too comfortable. But if you’re an immigrant in a new place, and you’re poor,” Margalit continued, “or you were once rich and your family was stripped of its wealth—then you have drive. You don’t see what you’ve got to lose; you see what you could win. That’s the attitude we have here—across the entire population.”8