Fifth Aliyah


The Fifth Aliyah refers to the fifth wave of the Jewish immigration to Palestine from Europe and Asia between the years 1929 and 1939, with the arrival of 225,000 to 300,000 Jews. The Fifth Aliyah, or fifth immigration wave, began after the comeback from the 1927 economic crisis in Mandatory Palestine and the 1929 Palestine riots, during the period of the Fourth Aliyah.
This wave of immigration began as a pioneering one, but with the onset of racial persecution in Nazi Germany attained the character of a mass migration between 1933 and 1939, with at least 55,000 Jews from Central Europe immigrating to Palestine or residing there as semi-permanent residents. The 1936-1939 Arab riots in Mandatory Palestine weakened the immigration wave, but during the years 1938-1939 thousands of Jewish immigrants arrived, some of them illegally. The British White Paper of 1939 severely curtailed Jewish immigration. The onset of World War II a few months later also inhibited immigration to Israel.

The causes for the immigration