A decade after Israel’s last great immigration wave subsided, a new one is under way – and its promise for the Jewish state is in some respects even greater than the wave that preceded it. 

There were five main immigrations following Israel’s establishment: The Holocaust survivors who arrived until the early 1950s; the Muslim lands’ Jews who arrived mostly during the 1950s; a post-’67 Russian and Western wave; the Ethiopian journeys of 1984- 1991; and the post-Soviet wave that arrived mainly in the 1990s.

The unfolding French immigration is different from all of them. Unlike the German immigration of the 1930s, it is happening despite, rather than because of, the country of origin’s government and elite. French Prime Minister Manuel Valls’s statement last week, that France without Jews would not be France, was as sincere as it was tragic.

Yet like the German immigration, and unlike the immigrations from the Middle East, Ethiopia and postwar Europe, French Jews are arriving with some capital, comprised of many professionals and entrepreneurs who are ready to join the middle class and in some cases, the upper class. [...]

This immigration’s uniqueness will be in the ties it will help build between Israel and Europe. France’s proximity, its thirst for technological innovation and its departing Jews’ familiarity with its culture are already turning the immigrants into agents of a new interface.

Nearly a fifth of recent years’ immigrants are engineers, and many others bring MBAs. They have largely been absorbed by Israel’s bottomless hi-tech sector, where there is plenty of room for thousands more programmers and executives, whose attraction to the local start-up scene is professional and unrelated to France’s political situation.

For the local companies, at the same time, the new arrivals bring a special added value, as Israelis’ foreign orientation has always been American. The new recruits carry in their pockets the key to France, and through it, to Germany and other neighboring countries.

This is priceless for local firms and their partners overseas, and is likely to result in French-Israeli cooperation on a scale not seen here since the big arms deals of the 1950 and ’60s.

This may cast the 11th Aliya as the one that built an economic bridge between its land of origin and the Jewish state. But even more uniquely, this immigration comes amid farewell pangs that accompanied no previous immigration during the Zionist enterprise’s 135 years.

Renowned filmmaker Claude Lanzmann’s cry, “Let’s not give Hitler this posthumous victory,” is apparently being ignored. The resistance veteran and creator of Shoah, the thorough documentary that may commemorate the Holocaust for the ages, finds himself at 90 surveying the crumbling of his postwar dream.