Who’s Populating the Jewish State?

Marjorie Miller (in “Home at Last,” June 30) writes that Joel and Donna Zeff and their family “left Los Angeles for Israel in 1994 for the same reason millions of Jews from around the world have migrated to the Middle East in the last half century: to take part in what Joel Zeff calls ‘the greatest Jewish adventure in 2,000 years’--the building of a Jewish state.”

In fact, it is well known that the vast majority of immigrants to Israel were spurred not by ideological conviction but by political or economic necessity. The most recent large waves of immigration have come from Ethiopia and the former Soviet Union. The number of North Americans who have immigrated to Israel over the years is, by comparison, negligible.

LITAL LEVY

Encino