[One] source of potential growth of the non-Arab Christians within Israel is the foreign worker community estimated at present to be over 200,000. The majority of foreign workers come to Israel from Christian states such as Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Rumania, and Hungary in eastern Europe, the Philippines and Thailand in Asia, Nigeria in Africa, and several countries in South America. Although they have not been granted Israeli citizenship and are not encouraged by the Israeli authorities to settle down, some of them do—by marrying local people or by staying illegally after their working license expires. Several churches in Jaffa and Haifa that became historical monuments following the 1948 war have recently revived their active communal life. Altogether the immigration from the ex-Soviet Union countries and from Ethiopia together with the advent of Christian foreign workers have created a new group of Christians affiliated with the Israeli Jewish-Hebrew cultural identity and whose national identity is Israeli, while being unaffiliated with the Jewish religion. According to the Israeli bureau of statistics estimate, this group numbers 23,000 people, and constitutes 17 percent of the total 130,000 Christians in Israel today.9