Monday December 8 2025: Thousands of Israeli's line up for appointment to obtain Portuguese citizenship.

Walk-in day event led by Portuguese embassy draws massive crowds as demand among Israeli's surges for EU passports.

Thousands of Israelis waited in line outside of Cinema City Glilot in the central city of Ramat Hasharon on November 28 2025 to book an appointment with the Portuguese Embassy to receive citizenship or renew Portuguese passports.

A line stretched from the entrance of the complex down to its underground parking structure after the Portuguese Embassy announced that it would allow people to wait in person – without advance scheduling – to secure appointments for citizenship or renewing Portuguese passports in December and January.

The embassy announced last month that it would be holding a special “Old times are back” event, temporarily bypassing its chronically overloaded online appointment system. In an announcement on the embassy’s Facebook page, it wrote that the event was “open to all Portuguese citizens.”

News of the opportunity spread quickly, drawing far more people than the venue could comfortably accommodate, with people waiting in line all day long. Many arrived before dawn in hopes of getting a slot, while others turned back after seeing the immense wait.

According to a post on the Embassy’s Facebook page following the event, “thousands” of citizens were helped and “no one was left unattended.”

Portugal recently announced that, starting in May 2026, Portuguese passports will be extended from five to 10 years. However, those who lined up on Friday are still expected to receive five-year passports under the current rules.

The surge of Israeli applicants for Portuguese citizenship began after Portugal passed its “law of return” in 2015, allowing the descendants of Portuguese Sephardic Jews who were affected by the 16th-century Inquisition to apply for nationality.

The Portuguese government had announced plans to end the policy in December 2023, saying at the time that its purpose of reparation had been “fulfilled.” However, rather than fully abolishing the route, the law was revised to make citizenship for Sephardic descendants more restrictive and conditional, including demonstrating stronger ties to Portugal, such as residing in the country for at least three years.

Portuguese citizenship has a wide-ranging appeal for Israelis, including the freedom of movement that comes with a European Union passport. Portugal has lower taxes and a lower cost of living than Israel, although its income levels are also proportionately lower. Some Israelis are drawn to the more relaxed admission rates at public universities in Europe and the lower tuition costs for EU nationals.

Demand has intensified since the Hamas-led October 7, 2023, attacks, as many Israelis have sought a second passport for added security in a period of heightened instability.

Meanwhile, The Times of Israel reported that a new study published on November 23 2025 found that 27 percent of Israelis are considering moving out of the country, even though the majority of them believe mass emigration would be dangerous for the future of the state.

The study by the Israel Democracy Institute was conducted in April. Among Jews, the less individuals identified as religious, the more likely they were to say they were considering emigration, and respondents identifying as left-wing were more likely to say so than those on the right.

Of those who said they were considering leaving, 69% of Jews said they had no specific pull abroad — it was just a matter of getting out of the country.

The poll was conducted after some 18 months of war on multiple fronts — before Israel’s 12-day war with Iran in June and before a fragile ceasefire was achieved last month in the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, leading to the return of all but three of the hostages held there. It is unclear whether these two developments would change the results.

Among those weighing emigration, those who identified as non-religious made up the highest percentage (39%), followed by traditional but non-religious (24%), traditional religious (19%), Orthodox (14%), and finally ultra-Orthodox (4%).

Among younger secular Jewish Israelis, 60% said they would consider leaving, and among those with a high income and a foreign passport, the figure jumped to 80%.

The more educated were more likely to consider leaving, and high and medium-high incomes created a higher likelihood as well. In the same vein, people with jobs that enabled more global mobility, such as high-tech, medicine, and finance, were most likely to consider leaving.

Israeli-born Jews with dual citizenship were more likely to consider leaving if they had lived abroad for any amount of time. The longer they had spent abroad, the more likely they were to consider moving away from Israel.

Respondents cited cost of living, security and political concerns and “the lack of a good future for my children” as top considerations for emigrating. The most popular destination among those thinking of leaving was the European Union (43%). higher than North America or Canada (27%).

Other concerns included public services, Israel’s international standing, the state of the country’s democracy, free speech, and Israel’s identity as the Jewish state.

The Times of Israel also reported that Israeli’s are emigrating abroad in numbers the country has never seen before – taking with them their money, education, and professional skills. The numbers behind this movement indicate long-term harm to Israel, even far from the conflict zones in the North and South.

More than 125,000 Israeli citizens moved abroad between early 2022 and mid-2024, the country’s largest-ever loss of human capital in such a short period, according to a report presented on Monday to the Knesset’s Immigration and Absorption Committee.

The report, compiled by the Knesset Research and Information Center, said that Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza may have been a factor causing the number of Israelis leaving the country permanently to skyrocket during those years.

Other factors mentioned in a previous report in February, including the political unrest that culminated in mass protests against the government’s judicial overhaul plan in 2023 and the ripple effects of the Russian-Ukrainian war, were not explicitly mentioned.

The trend is believed to have continued through 2025, as the war in Gaza stretched on.

“This is not a wave of emigration, it’s a tsunami of Israelis choosing to leave the country,” said committee chairman MK Gilad Kariv. He noted that Israel’s government does not currently have a plan to address the problem of Israelis leaving, and said his committee would work to tackle the issue in the future.

Some 59,400 Israelis left the country in 2022, and an all-time high 82,800 left in 2023, according to the report. In 2024, nearly 50,000 people left between January and August, the report said. For perspective, the average number of long-term emigrants between 2009 and 2021 was approximately 40,500 per year, the report said.

While in previous decades, most of the Israelis who left the country were seeking things like upward mobility, success and education, now, the main factor driving people away is the political and security situation, according to research by Lilach Lev Ari, a professor of sociology at Oranim College.

The National Insurance Institute can begin to terminate one’s residency in Israel after five years of residence abroad, although citizens can take the initiative to cancel their residency themselves, attorney Danny Zaken of the NII noted. Such requests have more than tripled from an average of 2,500 before 2021 to 8,400 in 2024, he noted.

The Immigration and Absorption Ministry does not have a plan to stem the tide of emigration, noted the ministry’s director of aliyah, Eric Michaelson.

“We are not a ministry for preventing emigration, and we do not have a mandate to stop the process of emigration from the country,” Michaelson told the committee. “[Only] immigrants and returning residents are under the care of the Immigration and Absorption Ministry, and we work to keep them in the country for a long time.”

One of the most worrying trends in the Israel Innovation Authority tech job report is the growing number of tech employees that have left Israel since the start of the war. Between October 2023 and July 2024, 8,300 tech employees left Israel for an extended period of at least a year, representing 2.1% of the entire tech workforce in Israel. 1,207 tech employees left Israel in October 2023 alone.

The report uncovers other worrying trends in addition to relocation. According to the report, for the first time in at least a decade, the Israeli high-tech industry experienced a decline in the number of employees, with about 5,000 employees leaving the industry in 2024. The report stresses that the overall number of employees in high-tech in Israel fell to 390,847 in 2024, down 1.2% from 2023 - the first time that the number of employees in the industry has contracted for more than a decade. This is a change from the consistent growth pattern that characterized the industry for more than a decade.

Inbal Green said she grew up in a Zionist family, believing that she had a duty to protect and serve Israel. She was a reservist for 14 years, volunteered with the Israeli police and the Israeli national medical emergency organization. “And then here comes October 7th” she said.

Her grandmother survived the Holocaust and settled in Israel, she said. But she doesn’t want what she calls the instability and chaos of today’s Israel to be her daughter’s responsibility. “The country suffers from PTSD. I don’t want her to carry that on her tiny shoulders,” Inbal said.

She admitted that she is also tired of carrying what she says is the burden of feeling insecure and uncertain about the future in her own country. “I don’t want to carry that anymore,” she said. “I think it’s OK to say … I want to breathe.” Inbal insisted she was sure she didn’t want to come back to live in Israel ever again.

Finally, Haaretz News reported that doctors are moving away from Israel on an unprecedented scale. ‘It’s a new phenomenon, of the past few months, and I’m concerned that it will only intensify,’ warns a senior administrator at one of Israel’s largest hospitals.

Prof. Gil Fire, 63, is an internist and deputy director of Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center (Ichilov Hospital), who lives in Tel Aviv. Prof. Fire, you have responsibility for physicians’ affairs at Sourasky. What has happened that you asked to meet urgently?

“I felt a burning need to talk about physicians who are leaving the country. I feel that something is happening to us that didn’t happen in the past, something different from what went on in the period of the judicial reform [in 2023]. I am extremely disturbed by this development, and it needs to worry us as a society and a state”.

Martin Blackham Israel First TV Program www.israelfirst.org