Emigration from the Soviet Union to Israel – for many years the Jewish communities from the USA and Israel had been struggling for the right of the Soviet Jews to emigrate to Israel. The Soviet authorities were allowing only the emigration of few. It was only in 1989 that Mikhail Gorbachev, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, opened the borders for the Jewish emigration. There was a sharp increase in the number of emigrants form the Soviet Union in Israel: 189,7 thousand people came to Israel from the Soviet Union in 1990; from 1989 to 1995 557,4 thousand people left the Soviet Union for Israel. According to the Israeli Ministry for Absorption 17% of them were not Jewish. A very serious problem of this wave of immigrants was, in most cases, the lack of bonds with the Jewish culture and religion. The Jews that came to Israel were often secularized or they grew up in mixed marriages. Some of them wanted only to leave the Soviet Union and they did not have a clear Jewish identity. They commonly did not know Hebrew which was banned in school in the Soviet Union. Among the immigrants were many intellectuals such as scientists, musicians or doctors. Their skills, however, were useless since they did not know the language. The Jewish Agency was taking care of the immigrants by organising Hebrew courses, providing them with flats and benefits. In 1996 Natan Sharansky founded the Yisrael Ba-Aliyah (Israel for the Emigration) Party which represented the Russian Jews.