The number of Soviet Jewish immigrants arriving in Israel topped the 100,000 mark last month for the first time in a single calendar year, the Soviet Jewry Research Bureau of the National Conference on Soviet Jewry announced Monday.
The bureau, which started tabulating emigration statistics in 1968, said the arrival of 18,725 Soviet Jews during September placed the total for the first nine months of 1990 at 100,926.
An additional 598 Jews left the Soviet Union for the United States in September under the U.S. government’s family reunification refugee program, the National Conference reported.
But as Soviet Jews continued to pour into Israel over the holiday weekend, the minister in charge of absorption, Yitzhak Peretz, was sharply critical of the way immigrant absorption is being handled.
On Sunday, Peretz submitted his first comprehensive report to the Cabinet in six months. He complained about delays in the construction of new housing and in the arrival of temporary housing, which come under the aegis of other ministries.
Meanwhile, an estimated 1,400 olim landed at Ben-Gurion Airport last Friday, on the eve of Yom Kippur. Their flights arrived from Warsaw, Bucharest and Budapest.
(JTA correspondent Hugh Orgel in Tel Aviv contributed to this report.)
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