Ashdod, Israel (CNN) Yoav Krief remembers the day he knew it was time to move to Israel: January 9, 2015.

"I was not good, really not good," Krief says of how he felt at the time. "I talked to my mom, and I said, 'We must go to Israel. We need to go to Israel.'"

Krief decided to leave France after a friend was killed in a terror attack.

Krief, a French Jew who had just finished high school, moved to Israel with his family six months later, as part of the largest migration of Jews from Western Europe to Israel since the modern state of Israel was created.

Nearly 8,000 French Jews moved to Israel in the year following the Charlie Hebdo attack, according to the Jewish Agency, which handles Jewish immigration, or aliyah, to Israel.

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