The unique group comprises 13 families, with at least one health-care professional in each family. They've arrived in Israel through a special project initiated by Keren Kayemeth L’Yisrael (KKL) and the independent nonprofit Klitat Kehillat Yisrael organization, known in La Belle France as "Alyah de Groupe."
The project is meant to promote the development of Israel's periphery while offering new olim the opportunity of a meaningful aliyah.
According to JNS, one of the main reasons the new olim chose to settle as a group in Nahariya is because of the opportunity to work as physicians, dentists and pharmacists in an area that on the one hand is relatively deprived of health professionals and on the other hand is home to the largest government hospital in the Galilee: the Western Galilee Medical Center.
Due to the coronavirus (aka COVID19 or Chinese Plague)
...the twenty first century equivalent of bubonic plague, only instead of killing off a third of the population of Europe it kills 3.4 percent of those who notice they have it. It seems to be fond of the elderly, especially Iranian politicians and holy men...pandemic, the pilot trip that was planned to take place was cancelled, meaning that many of them never even visited Nahariya before making the move. Nevertheless, the new French olim aren't complaining. Most of them are actually grateful for the support they received throughout the process and during a pandemic, making everything naturally more complicated.
"With [Klitat Kehillat Yisrael's] help, we were able to navigate the bureaucratic challenges of making aliyah during a pandemic with five children," Dr. Hava Tmim, one of the olim, said.
Israel faces a shortage of medical staff including both doctors and nurses, partly due to the fact that many of the country's medical professionals arrived in the first wave of aliyah from the former Soviet Union in the 1990s and are now retiring.
That's why initiatives such as this one, which find new ways of combining the country's national interests to the aliyah enterprise - allowing meaningful and practical additions to Israel's professional fields - are not only important, but crucial.