Life in Israel has drastically changed since its establishment as the country developed from a former Imperial backwater to a modern Western state. With the state's advancement, emigration to Israel has also changed, and real estate entrepreneur Alberto Shemaria has embraced this new reality into his business model to facilitate contemporary and innovative Aliyah.
"Many years ago, coming to Israel was a completely super Zionist thing to do and extremely sacrificing," Shemaria said. New immigrants to Israel often had to exchange a "comfortable life outside of Israel for a country that was emerging."
Shemaria described modern Aliyah -- immigration to Israel -- as a staggered process with steady steps into the deep end of the Middle East rather than a decisive plunge into a new state, and one that needn't require complete abandonment of the community and environment that one had grown accustomed to in their home country.
He is working with his company, Isracap Grand, to enable this modern Aliyah, alongside investment in Israel with his real estate vision, which includes building housing projects designed especially for olim, as well as facilitating real estate investment in Israel from the diaspora.
Shemaria expressed the belief that his project will serve as a bridge for Diaspora Jewish communities to living in Israel.
"The big thing is many people that are accustomed to many things outside of Israel, as have many of us," said Shemaria. "Types of buildings, types of people. The culture here is completely different. We started brokering a lot of apartments to people outside of Israel as an investment, and they were extremely excited about it. But when you talk to them, the first question is, what type of people are going to be there? Okay, it's an investment, but if I someday want to go and live at my home, who's going to be my neighbor?"
While Shemaria originally sought to develop his projects for the Israeli market, two years ago, they started speaking with buyers and investors from an American Jewish community about adapting the building to their needs.
"We're building a very exciting [building for a] Jewish community from America with all the luxury facilities that they are accustomed to -- the Beit Knesset [synagogue] exactly like the way we're accustomed, with sizes of apartment, double the size of the apartments that were supposed to be there," said Shemaria. "The whole planning of the building from the beginning is being targeted to these people outside of Israel. They will go down to the garden, and they'll see people as they see in America, with the same type of people, even the retail -- we're trying to have retail that they are accustomed to in America. So it's going to be like a soft landing to Israel."
Shemaria doesn't necessarily want to transplant whole communities into Israel but to find like-minded people to form new communities. He said that he had been getting inquiries about a building project geared toward Sephardic religious tradition communities from New York, New Jersey, Mexico, Panama, and Brazil. The building would be in the same neighborhood as the Americentric building.
"I think that the neighborhood could turn into something very, very amazing for foreigners," said Shemaria.
While the neighborhood serves as a soft landing for foreigners, there is also the possibility that such projects could create bubbles in Israeli cities. Many a nation have faced the challenge of integrating immigrants into their societies. Ethnic enclaves in which residents create identities in opposition to the rest of society or cannot interact with fellow citizens because of gaps in language and culture often result in pronounced tensions in states. Shemaria did not think that bubbles would be created by his projects and instead would result in a "beautiful merging."
Some of the tenants would be Israeli, and the general neighborhood would still be "super Israeli." He argued that there were cities and towns in which there were many residents with different backgrounds, such as Ra'anana, where he said he barely heard Hebrew in the restaurants. Israel has a strong and "not very changeable" culture, said Shemaria, and the olim would become part of it.
Starting slow
Yet not all of those who would purchase homes in Shemaria's projects would move to Israel -- at least not immediately.
"It doesn't mean that they're going to move [to Israel]. It means that it's a start. It's starting the whole process of [aliyah], little by little starting as a vacation home and then moving like it happens in many places," said Shemaria.
He contended that many Jews felt that the United States had been a good place to live. They had their businesses and families there and needed to develop suitable infrastructure in Israel before they made the full move to the Jewish state.
"I think people are interested in setting afoot here, putting money here, having a roof...or the ones that are investing in our developments to start having money producing in Israel," said Shemaria. "I'm sure that it's very scary to say I'm buying because I want to move. So I think people have that in the back of their minds that eventually we will all end up here."
He felt that many of those who made inquiries into his projects may have sought to build themselves an escape hatch, especially since the October 7 Massacre and the rise in antisemitism in the diaspora.
"After October 7, every minute they see from their office in Manhattan, pro-Palestinian rallies and the police don't do anything. So it's not so cool to live like that. And it's also uncomfortable," said Shemaria.
Beyond serving as a bridge to Jewish communities in the Diaspora who are starting Aliyah processes or thinking of a distant Aliyah, Shemaria's project is also aimed at strengthening the ties of Jews in the Diaspora to Israel through investment.
Speaking about one of his Jerusalem projects, which his family had the capital to create without bringing in investors, Shemaria explained the logic behind bringing foreign investment into Israel anyway.
"I said to my father, 'Why invite investors?' And he told me, 'Because that's your mission.'"
It's about giving people access to investment in Israel and making that tangible connection to the country.
Beyond possibly creating enclaves of immigrants, Shemaria's project could impact local communities in other ways.
Jerusalem is a city with a serious housing problem. As the population has expanded, housing has not expanded at a rate that can keep up, and many neighborhoods do not have enough classrooms, parking spaces, clinics, and green spaces for their residents.
The city also had nearly 200,000 "ghost apartments" as of 2018, according to the Central Bureau of Statistics. These apartments, used as vacation homes or investments and empty for most of the year, impact housing availability and prices for current residents of the city.
Shemaria's project has the potential to create more ghost apartments, as foreigners who plan to move to the country in the future buy houses they don't intend to live in year-round.
Additionally, building luxury apartments or large apartments aimed at foreign tastes in a city where low-income housing is lacking and students struggle to find affordable rents could only exacerbate these issues.
While just a few projects will likely not have a huge impact on their own, the projects are part of real estate moves that can only serve to make Jerusalem housing less accessible.
Shemaria says that these problems and impacts are unavoidable and that they have been happening since before foreigners started buying real estate in the city.
Housing price increases are not something "we can choose," he said. "It's something that is going to happen."
The entity able to impact this and attempt to solve these problems is the government, Shemaria added, saying that a start on this would be releasing more lands for development.
Alex Winston contributed to this report.