The New Jewish Diaspora Is Not Where You Think

From Limassol to Koh Phangan, Jews are building lives in places our grandparents would not have put on a map. Increasingly, that is the rational choice.

The wandering Jew has a new itinerary.

For most of the past century, the mental map of Jewish migration ran along familiar lines. You left Eastern Europe or the Middle East/North Africa for New York, London, Paris or Israel. Beyond that, you waited.

That map is being redrawn in real time, and the new pins are showing up in places that would have struck my grandparents as absurd. Limassol. Lisbon. Batumi. Koh Phangan. And yes, in growing numbers, Singapore and Bangkok too, which is where I am writing this from.

The reasons are not mysterious. In March and April 2026, a series of attacks targeted Jewish institutions across London. Synagogues, schools, charities, all hit by arson, explosives, and chemicals. Iranian proxies were implicated. On 29 April, a man went out into Golders Green with a knife specifically to stab “visibly Jewish” people. Two men, aged 34 and 76, were seriously wounded. The British government raised the national terror threat from substantial to severe and declared antisemitism an emergency.

The Community Security Trust recorded 3,700 antisemitic incidents in the UK in 2025. Only one year on record was worse: 2023, the year of October 7.

In New York, the largest ‘Jewish city’ in the world, the political environment has shifted in ways that have many in the community openly weighing an exit. Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani has refused to recognise Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, identified as an anti-Zionist, and previously declined to condemn the phrase “globalise the intifada.” Within hours of his win, rabbis in Plano, real estate agents in Miami, and Israel’s Diaspora Minister were publicly inviting Jewish New Yorkers to come and build a life elsewhere. One synagogue board president in North Texas put it plainly: come where Jewish life is thriving and you are unmistakably welcome.

The interesting question is not whether Jews are leaving. They are. Aliyah from France rose 45 percent in 2025 to 3,300. From the UK, up 19 percent to 840, the second consecutive annual increase. The interesting question is where the ones not going to Israel are going.

Cyprus, forty minutes from home

Limassol is the headline story.

An estimated 15,000 Israelis now live in Greek Cyprus. Three waves drove this: COVID, the 2023 judicial reform protests, and October 7 and the war that followed. Some 800 Israeli families are in Limassol, around 400 in Larnaca. Between 2021 and 2025, Israelis bought over 1,100 properties in Limassol alone, and nearly 4,000 across the island.

What turns a wave of arrivals into a community is infrastructure, and that is now being built at serious scale. The Yael Foundation, set up in 2020 by Uri and Yael Poliavich, who themselves moved permanently to Cyprus, is constructing what will be one of the most ambitious Jewish schools built anywhere in the past century. The Cyprus Jewish Academy of Excellence in Limassol is an $82 million flagship project. When complete, the IB-curriculum school will sit on a hilltop outside Limassol with a full-size soccer pitch, a 900-seat auditorium, a beit midrash and synagogue, music rooms, dance studios, robotics workshops.

It opens in 2027. So does its sister.

Yael is also building a school in Lisbon, the first Jewish school in Portugal, the foundation says, since the 16th century. Read that sentence again. The first since the Inquisition.

Batumi, Antibes, and the warm-water diaspora

Georgia is the quieter story.

Since 7 October, Batumi has become a welcoming place for Jews, bucking the trend in many European cities. The city now has four synagogues and several kosher restaurants. Batumi today hosts the second-largest Jewish community in Georgia, with a luxury kosher hotel, a restored Ashkenazi synagogue, and an active Chabad house. Shuva Israel, the global community led by Rabbi Yoshiyahu Pinto, has opened a study centre in the city, anchored by a residential complex purchased by around 200 Jews, some of whom now live there full time. The pull is the same combination repeated everywhere on this list: warm weather, no street-level antisemitism to speak of, and a tax regime that does not punish you for earning.

The French Riviera, less obvious to outsiders, has been quietly becoming a refuge for French Jews leaving Paris. Le Cannet, a small suburb on the northern edge of Cannes, now has roughly 250 Jewish families and inaugurated its first synagogue in 2018, driven largely by families fleeing antisemitism in larger cities. Antibes and Juan-les-Pins now sustain kosher shops, restaurants, and a Chabad house. Nice anchors the regional community around its Great Synagogue, with Cannes, Antibes and Juan-les-Pins functioning as satellites of Ashkenazi and Sephardi life.

The Far East

Then there is my side of the world.

A member of Thailand’s parliament estimated this month that around 4,000 Israelis are living long-term on Koh Phangan, alongside another 3,000 tourists at any given time. An island synonymous with full-moon parties is now home to a Hebrew-speaking sub-population large enough that officials raided an Israeli-run daycare with 89 children on it in May 2026. The same MP flagged that some of the businesses running on the island, hotels, schools, retail, were unlicensed. The fact that there is anything to license at all tells you how far this has gone.

David’s Circle, a trauma-recovery centre for Israelis on Koh Phangan, estimates around 600 Israeli families now live on the island, with thousands more visiting short-term. Koh Samui, Phuket and Bangkok all sit on the same trajectory at lower intensity. Chabad of Koh Samui now runs a preschool alongside its synagogue with several kosher restaurants opening up on Samui in the past few years.

What is particularly interesting is that Thailand itself is opening up more and more to the idea of legal, long term residents who can stay and work in raise families in Thailand, granted in large part due to their economic stagnation and dwindling birthrates. Many overseas residents now have a clear (and affordable) pathway to relocation.

Singapore and Hong Kong, where the established communities are older and smaller, have been quietly building too. Sir Manasseh Meyer International School in Singapore now teaches from nursery through Grade 10 on a 500-capacity Sembawang campus, with over 30 nationalities represented. Carmel in Hong Kong, founded in 1991, is now an IB Continuum school of over 370 students across three campuses. Neither is large by global standards. Both are growing into demand that did not exist a decade ago.

What this actually means

There is an old line that the only true home of the wandering Jew is in Eretz Yisrael. I believe that, in the spiritual register.

But for the people not making that move, and there will always be many, the question is no longer whether the diaspora is shifting. It already has. The question is how much it will continue to do so.

The Yael Foundation does not spend $82 million on a school in Limassol because it expects a community of a few hundred families to stay small. The foundation is adding roughly ten new schools per quarter, and the Limassol school is designed to anchor 1,500 students. Lisbon will be the first Jewish day school in Portugal since the 16th century. Koh Samui has a Jewish preschool. Le Cannet has its first-ever synagogue. Batumi has four.

Each of these places, individually, looks like a curiosity. Together, they look like a pattern.  Around 100 years ago, a great migration of Jews took place. I can’t help but feel that a similar trend is taking shape. The question is what the extent of it will be and what will happen to the Jews who decide to stay behind.

The diaspora of the last century clustered in cities that have become hostile or expensive or both. The diaspora of the next one is more distributed, often warmer, frequently safer, and almost always cheaper. It is being built right now, in real money, by people voting with their feet.

I left Europe twice. I have no plans to return. And every month, more people I know are making the same calculation, and arriving at the same conclusion in different postal codes.

The wandering has not stopped. It has just found new destinations.