According to at least one recent report, Argentinian Jews moved to the Holy Land at a significantly higher rate in 2020 than 2019.

In 2020, approximately 20,000 Jewish people made aliyah (“going up”) to the land of Israel from 70 countries. While this number is smaller than the recorded 30,000+ in 2019, 567 of them were from the South American country of Argentina – 107 more than 2019 according to the Jewish Agency for Israel, as noted by The Jerusalem Post.

Head of Aliyah Promotion in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, Alejandro Mellincovsky, said, “Israel is an attractive country, even before the pandemic it was a very attractive country, but now even more, when you see the performance of the vaccination process and the beginning of the recovery.”

These statistics mean that while overall aliyah was down in 2020, the number coming from Argentina increased by 26%. Argentina has Latin America’s largest Jewish population with the capital city of Buenos Aires hosting well over 150,000.