Jerusalem (CNSNews.com) - Israel's decision to absorb Jewish immigrants from around the world, even though most were poor, many uneducated and the majority were fleeing oppression, is part of its amazing success story, an Israeli official who has been involved in Jewish immigration to the country for decades told Cybercast News Service .

More than three million Jews have immigrated to Israel since the state's founding in 1948, augmenting the population and giving it the necessary manpower to become a modern state.

Sixty years ago, the population of Israel was some 600,000. Today, the population stands at more than 7 million, some 75 percent of whom are Jewish.

"Without any question, [Israel is] an enormous success story," said Asher Cailingold, a former head of the immigrant division at the Jewish Agency, the quasi-governmental body responsible for immigration to the Jewish State.

"One of the reasons was that we were determined to absorb whoever wanted to come, including the huge numbers who came from the former Soviet Union, who did in the main bring with them education, experience, skills and also the numbers that came from places like Ethiopia, who came with nothing," Cailingold told Cybercast News Service in a recent interview at his Jerusalem home.

The right of every Jew in the world to immigrate to Israel is enshrined in Israel's Declaration of Independence, and the Law of Return (which guide immigration policy) is one of Israel's basic laws, said Cailingold.

Immediately after Israel declared its independence on May 14, 1948, it began absorbing huge numbers of immigrants, almost all of them coming either from Third World countries or fleeing oppression or having survived World War II.

(Many Jews had already slipped into the country, despite strict British control over immigration in the previous decades.)

Many immigrants had little or no financial resources, and in many cases, they had little or no education. Yet, considering the achievements that Israel has made in the fields of science, medical research and public services, "it is an amazing story of success," said Cailingold.

Cailingold's personal involvement with immigration here spanned decades, even before he and his wife Edna came here from England in 1957.

On his first trip to Israel in 1950, he worked as a volunteer in the tent camps set up for new immigrants from Yemen in a place called Mesilat Tzion, not far from Jerusalem.

From June 1949 through September 1950, nearly the entire Yemenite Jewish community -- some 49,000 -- were secretly brought to Israel on British and American transport planes in an operation known as "Magic Carpet" or "On Wings of Eagles." (Today there are an estimated 1,000 Jews still living in Yemen.)

"They were living in tents [that were sinking in the mud]. The rain was pouring down. It was freezing cold. By the way, they weren't used to this climate; Yemen doesn't have that sort of climate...and they were just miserable," Cailingold said.

Forty years later, during the Gulf War in the winter of 1990-1991, Iraqi Scud missiles were falling on Israel. Cailingold and his wife were caught on the highway when the siren sounded, indicating a missile attack. They took refuge in the first town they came to.

"When we took off our gas masks we asked where we were - Mesilat Tzion. We weren't sitting in a tent with the rain coming through. We were sitting in a beautiful villa," he said. "These people had managed to build for themselves an amazingly high standard of living, were completely absorbed into the country, the children were speaking fluent Hebrew....

"If you like, that is Israel in a capsule. Moving from 1950 to 1990, what a difference in the way of life. And these were rural people, people living in the villages, earning a living mainly from agriculture or from businesses but still having a decent way of life, and all done within forty years, which I think is quite remarkable," he said.

Cailingold also was involved with a small group of 57 Ethiopian immigrants who arrived in Israel in 1977. "We had to start literally from ground zero in order to help these people to become involved not only in the life of Israel but in the life of western civilization," he said.

Over the years there were basically three kinds of immigration: immigration from free countries; rescue operations - like those from Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Morocco; and those coming from oppressed countries such as the former Soviet Union, Cailingold said.

For decades, Jews living in the former Soviet Union lost their jobs if they even applied to immigrate to Israel. Cailingold and his wife were part of two secret missions in the 1980s to the former Soviet Union, bringing materials and information to Jews behind the Iron Curtain, he said.

Since the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1990, more than 900,000 Jews from the former Soviet Union have emigrated to Israel and more than 44,000 have come here from Ethiopia.

Immigration from free countries, particularly North America, has never been very high compared with the number of Jews living there.

Recently, some groups have offered incentives to North American Jews to immigrate to Israel, but Cailingold said that incentives usually are not strong enough to persuade people to stay here.

The only reason to come to Israel is because one wants to live here, he said. Everything else is "minor in comparison with the supreme desire to want to come to live in the State of Israel, to become part and parcel with the good, the bad and the ugly."

Cailingold said he believes that American Jews probably will not come to Israel in large numbers until the financial and security situation improves here and until more Jews in America "get the idea that the place of the Jews is here."

As part of Israel's 60th anniversary celebrations, the Jewish Agency and the Absorption Ministry sponsored an "Aliyah Day 2008" marking the immigration and absorption of new immigrants. ("Aliyah" is the Hebrew word for immigration.)

Last week, some 400 new immigrants from more than 20 countries arrived in Israel - including some from the U.S., Brazil, Argentina, England, France, Honduras, Italy, Germany, Hungary, Russia, Ukrain, Australia, South Africa and Turkey. They will settle in more than 50 communities throughout Israel, the Jewish Agency said.