What is the Law of Return?

Immediately after Israel gained independence in 1948, it declared that any Jew, from anywhere in the world, could move to Israel and become a citizen. In 1950, this policy was formalized when the Knesset (Israel’s parliament) voted unanimously to enact the Law of Return, which states, succinctly:
 
Every Jew has the right to immigrate to the country
 
There’s a reason it’s called the Law of Return, not the Law of Immigration. This statute is based on the premise that, as Israel’s Declaration of Independence puts it:
 
The Land of Israel was the birthplace of the Jewish people. Here their spiritual, religious and political identity was shaped. Here they first attained to statehood, created cultural values of national and universal significance….
 
In short, the Knesset passed a law aimed at letting Jews whose ancestors were forced out of the land thousands of years earlier to return with the full rights of citizenship. Later, the law was amended to allow the children or grandchildren of a Jew, as well as their first-degree relatives, to gain citizenship as well. The Nazis used a similar definition to determine who was Jewish, and Israel decided that anyone who could have been subject to anti-Jewish Nazi persecution deserves to be welcomed by the Jewish state.
 
Allowing Jews to “return” to their homeland was one of the fundamental goals of the Zionist movement, and the founders of Israel knew that hundreds of thousands of Jews were languishing in Displaced Persons camps in Europe and were endangered in Arab countries throughout the Middle East.
 
After the Holocaust, many Jews had nowhere to go, and after Israel became an independent state, anti-Semitic acts grew rampant throughout the Arab world. Israel’s leaders knew these people needed a home, a place of refuge, and they hastened to open the country’s gates to all who needed a place to go.
 
The Law of Return has generated controversy over the years, and it continues today. On one hand, Palestinians demand their own “right of return” and on the other hand, a current effort by Orthodox Israeli politicians seeks to withhold rights under the Law of Return from people who convert to Judaism in any non-Orthodox manner.