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Chairman of the Jewish Agency: Arie Dulzin.

During 1980 there is a renewal of the immigration of black Jews from Ethiopia: 209 arrive. This is the beginning of what is to become one of the main immigrations of the 1980s. In the following year the number will rais to 956, and in 1982 there will be 891. At the very moment when the immigration from the Soviet Union will fall to its lowest in a decade (1,314 in 1983, 896 in 1984), that from Ethiopia will take place. Most of these new immigrants will come from the Tigre province: within five years, almost all of the Jews of Tigre will have reached Israel. From other provinces, the rate of immigration is steady at about 200 a month.

New immigrants in 1980: 20,428.

January 7-10: Menachem Begin and Anwar al-Sadat meet for talks in Aswan.

January 23: The fifth stage of the Israeli withdrawal from Sinai is completed.

February 2: Hanna Rovina, the grande dame of the Israeli theater, dies at age 90.

February 18 : Israel and Egypt formally exchange ambassadors.

February 24: The Israeli lira is replaced by the shekel.

February 27: Talks between Israel, Egypt, and the US on the future of the autonomy in the West Bank and Gaza Strip start in Holland.

February 29 : Yigal Allon dies suddenly while campaigning to become the leader of the Labor Party.

March 1 : The US joins all other members of the UN Security Council and votes in favor of Resolution 465, calling on Israel to dismantle existing West Bank settlements and to cease establishing new ones. It also contains numerous references to Jerusalem as occupied Arab territory.

March 3: El Al inaugurates a regular line to Cairo.

March 10: Yitzhak Shamir is appointed foreign minister.

April 7 : Five PLO gunmen from Lebanon penetrate the Misgav Am Kibbutz, near the Lebanese border, and seize the nursery. Holding the children and some adults hostage, they demand the release of captives held by the Israelis. The terrorists are killed and the hostages rescued by a crack Israeli assault unit. Two kibbutz members and one Israeli soldier are killed.

April: The El Al security personnel find a bomb on a flight from Zurich to Tel Aviv and foil the attempt to blow up the plane.

May 2 : Arab terrorists kill 6 Jews and injure 17 at Hebron. Israeli military authorities order the deportation of the mayors of Hebron and the nearby village of Halhoul for incitement to violence. The mayors appeal to Israeli courts, which affirm the order. In December, they will be deported to southern Lebanon.

May 8: The autonomy talks are suspended at Egypt's initiative.

May 16: The IDF takes action against the PLO in Lebanese territory. The PLO retaliates by bombing

May 25 : Defense Minister Ezer Weizmann resigns from the Begin government. He disagrees with the government over the autonomy talks and settlement policy.

June 2 : The Arab mayors of Nablus and Ramallah are seriously injured by explosives planted in their cars. A third device, planted in the car of the mayor of El Bireh, explodes as it is being dismantled by an Israeli bomb expert, blinding him. Prime Minister Menachem Begin condemns these attacks, which are believed to be perpetrated by Israeli extremists.

June 12-13: The European Economic Community adopts the Venice Declaration which acknowledges the right of existence of Israel and all states in the region, and the right of the Palestinian people to exercise fully its right to self-determination. It does not call for an independent Palestinian state nor recognize the PLO as the sole representative of the Palestinian people. It calls for the end of Israel's territorial occupation, the creation of Israeli settlements and an agreed-upon status for Jerusalem.

June 30: The UN Security Council adopts Resolution 476.

July: Israel receives 4 American F-16 jet fighters. They will receive about 4 per month, a total of 75.

July: The Knesset Defense and Foreign Affairs Committee receives and intelligence estimate that the amount of uranium supplied by France to Iraq and other help from France for Iraq's French-made nuclear reactor would enable Iraq to produce atomic bombs by mid 1980s.

July 30 : The Knesset adopts a new basic law, Jerusalem, the capital of Israel. Few political leaders are prepared to oppose this private bill, proposed by the right-wing Tehiyah Party, even though it will undoubtedly arouse international disapproval. Venezuela and Uruguay immediately announce their intention to move their embassies from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv.

August 19 : Israel conducts the largest operation since Operation Litani in 1978: 18 PLO targets are hit in an area extending about 20 miles into Lebanon from the Israeli border.

August 21 : The UN Security Council passes a resolution calling on all nations to remove their embassies from Jerusalem. The vote is 14-0, with the US abstaining.

September 17: The war between Iran and Iraq breaks out.

October 5: A bomb planted in a package explodes in a post office in Givatayim, killing 3 and wounding 7.

October: Energy Minister Yitzhak Moday and US Secretary of State Edmund G. Muskie sign an agreement ensuring that Israel will have sufficient oil supply until 1994.

October 26-30 : President Yitzhak Navon makes a successful visit to Egypt. He is the first Israeli head of state to visit an Arab country. His welcome by Anwar al-Sadat is carried live on Egyptian radio and television.

November 5: The cost of gasoline rises by 25%.

November 6: A Katyusha missile attack on Kiryat Shmonah wounds several residents. The next day, IDF planes respond by attacking PLO bases in southern Lebanon.

November 28: Painter and author of children's books Nahum Gutman, dies at age 82.

December 3: Young men from the distressed Hatikva neighborhood lock the Mayor of Tel Aviv Shlomo Lahat in his office. He is released an hour later, by the police, the fire brigade, and the border police.

December 18: Shimon Peres beats Yitzhak Rabin as the Labor Party's candidate for the post of prime minister at the party's third convention.

December: The Knesset passes an amendment to the anatomy and pathology law restricting medical discretion to perform autopsies and organ transplants. The bill implements a coalition with Agudat Israel and is passed over the protests of the Israel Medical Association that it would hamper progress of medical science.

This year sees the largest increase in settlements in Israel for thirty years, the 38 new settlements are almost all across the Green Line, the pre-1967 border.

In 1980, Israel's annual inflation rate is 132.9%.

The Museum of the Diaspora in Tel Aviv exhibits "Libya: An Extinct Jewish Community"; "Kafka - Prague"; "Judaism in Medieval Art"; and "The Closed Curtain: The Moscow Yiddish State Theater", depicting the history of the theater from its creation to 1949.

The Tel Aviv Museum exhibits "El Lissitzky: Eleven Original Gouaches for the Chad Gadya, Kiev, 1919."

US President Jimmy Carter presents the Medal of Freedom to Admiral Hyman Rickover.

January: Andrei Sakharov, 1975 winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, and his wife, Elena Bonner, are exiled to the city of Gorky. He had demanded withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan.

February: Kurt Lischka, former deputy Gestapo chief in Paris, Herbert Hagen and Ernst Heinrichsohn are convicted in Cologne of the responsibility for deportation of about 70,000 Jews from France to the Nazi death camps. Serge Klarsfeld, a Jewish lawyer, and his wife, Beate, gathered the evidence. Lischka receives a ten-year sentence.

March 18: Psychoanalyst and author Erich Fromm dies.

July: Terrorists attack a group of Jewish children in Antwerp, Belgium, killing 1 and injuring 17 other persons.

Paul Berg, US biochemist, is awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry for his fundamental studies of the biochemistry of nucleic acids, with particular regard to recombinant DNA.

Baruj Benacerraf, professor of pathology at the Harvard Medical School, is awarded the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for the discovery of the role of antigens in organ transplants.

Walter Gilbert, Harvard professor of molecular biology, is awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry for developing ways of finding the order in which the individual links are present in the chainlike molecules of nucleic acids.

Lawrence R. Klein, US economist, is awarded the Nobel Prize in economy for developing computer models for the world's economy.

The Jewish Museum in New York exhibits "Danzig 1939: Treasures of a Destroyed Community". It also exhibits "Andy Warhol: Ten Portraits of Jews of the 20th Century" and "Remembrances of the Near East, Photographs by Felix Bonfils."