Was there actual mass immigration to Israel immediately following the passing of the Law of Return? I feel like maybe in 1950, there was a rush to leave Europe following the tragedy of the Holocaust, but in 1970, when the law was amended to include those of Jewish ancestry, did foreign governments see this as unnecessary? Was there an even larger immigration in 1970 than before?
Thanks in advance!
The Law of Return was definitely effective in bringing a lot of immigration to Israel.
First and foremost, in the years following the establishment of Israel, you're right in saying that there were plenty of immigrants from Europe. There were also many that came from surrounding Arab countries.
Martin Gilbert writes in Israel: A History writes that 686,000 Jews arrived in Israel between May 15, 1947 and December 13, 1951. The rush was huge. Almost 125,000 came from Iraq, for example, in the years following the 1948 war. Another 120,000 were Holocaust survivors, over 105,000 of them from Poland. Another 115,000 or so left Romania. 45,000 from Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria.
You get the idea.
In 1970, the law amendment was geared around a few things. You can read the amendment here. The amendment was meant to handle a few things:
Family reunification.
Generational passing down of Jewish status.
The basic idea was this: the principle of jus sanguinis. To keep it short and sweet, there are two types of citizenship-granting that happens automatically. One, jus soli, means that anyone born in a country (sometimes with qualifications) automatically becomes a citizen. This is the setup of the United States. Then there's jus sanguinis, which is based on lineage: are you a descendant of a citizen? And if so, how far down the line?
Israel has jus sanguinis. But this was expanding jus sanguinis, to include family reunification. There were numerous reasons for the expansion, but the main one was the Shalit case. Here's a summary:
Benjamin Shalit, an Israeli Jewish naval officer, married a Scottish woman abroad and returned with her to Israel where they had two children. As Shalit is an Israeli citizen the children were automatically Israeli citizens. However, in the early 1960s the Shalits, considering themselves atheists but part of the Jewish nation, attempted to register their children as Jews under the "nationality" designation, while keeping the "religion" category blank. The Ministry of Interior refused, and instead wanted to keep both "nationality" and "religion" blank. As Jewishness follows a maternal line in the Jewish tradition, the disagreement was fierce. Shalit petitioned to the Supreme Court which ruled in his favor in 1970 by 5:4. Shalit v. Minister of the Interior, 68/58. In a different but related development, the nationality identification was erased from personal IDs in Israel, but is still recorded in the national population registry.
So that was the basic case. Summary comes from:
Nahshon Perez. "Israel's Law of Return: A Qualified Justification." Modern Judaism 31.1 (2011): 59-84. Project MUSE. Web. 18 Feb. 2015.
That hopefully should give you an idea! It did correlate with some extra immigration, but that had already begun in the years before and after. Even so, interesting stuff!