Scuds No Deterrent to Soviet Jews : Israel: The inflow of immigrants continues, and they seem relieved to have left even more uncertain conditions behind.

When Faina Yampolskaya arrived in Israel this week, her first lesson on life in her new country consisted of tips on the use of a gas mask in case of an Iraqi chemical attack.

Her second was on the use of disposable diapers to replace the bulky Soviet cotton ones her 2-year-old twins were wearing.

All in all, the mother of three from Byelorussia decided, not a bad deal.

“Here, we’re very happy that they take care of us,” Yampolskaya said--even if care means handing out gas masks and radios for air raid alerts. “There, they didn’t care about us at all.”

“Here, they’ll defend us,” Faina’s mother, Dvoira Goman, put in. “Here, we’re citizens with full rights and we have protection. There, we had no protection.”

Through the series of Scud missile attacks on Israeli cities, near-nightly air raid alarms and Iraq’s continued threats to punish Israel, the stream of Soviet immigrants into this embattled country has continued.

That more than 10,000 Jews who arrived in January would consider even a country under attack preferable to the Soviet Union is one of the most striking indications yet of the powerful push behind Soviet emigration.

The continued inflow has also given a morale boost to Israelis when they needed one badly, after so many sleepless nights punctuated by hours spent in sealed rooms and gas masks.

Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, speaking to lawmakers this week, declared: “Nothing characterizes the uniqueness of the Jewish people and the fatefulness of the hour more than the fact that the immigration to Israel continues even in the midst of war.”

Soviet immigrants arriving at Ben-Gurion International Airport admitted that they had been worried about the threat against Israel but played down their fears. They were more afraid, they said, of what will happen in the Soviet Union in the coming period.

“The Soviet Union is in the situation that the politics at the top has taken such a twist that it’s terrifying to stay, and they could close the borders,” said Vladimir Fechtman, an electrician from Minsk.

As for the missiles falling on Israel, Fechtman said: “The women are afraid--I’m not. Because our Leningrad was being bombarded for two years . . . but most people died of hunger, not of the bombing,” he added in a reference to his World War II experience, when Leningrad was under attack by the Germans.

One immigrant who asked not to be identified by name summed up their thinking: People who leave behind the contaminated areas near the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident or the seemingly insoluble tangle of the Soviet economy know that “there, the problems are forever. Here, at least we can hope that it’s temporary.”

Fechtman added that “compared to what I’ve seen in my life, I think it’s not so terrible, what’s happening here. I lived my whole life without an apartment, with endless problems, endless lines, eternal humiliation.”

For the immigrants, arrival in Israel climaxes months or years of struggling with the Soviet bureaucracy to gain the passports, special stamps and permission they need to leave.

The war in the Persian Gulf added special tensions to the wait.

“When the first rockets landed, we had no information,” said Faina Yampolskaya’s husband, Misha.

He said he traveled from Minsk to Moscow to get to the telephone center from which he could call his relatives in Israel to find out the real situation. He had to wait a full day, in a line of 150 people, to call, he said.

But then, “All our relatives said the same thing--’Don’t worry,’ ” he said. “They calmed us down.”

Several new immigrants in the reception hall at the airport said they have given up on Soviet media reports, which seem to overemphasize the damage in Israel, and listened only to shortwave broadcasts of Israeli Radio, which reassured them.

And even if the war sounded frightening, Ella Fechtman, Vladimir’s wife, said: “We didn’t want to wait until it ended.

“We were sick and tired of this unstable life,” she said, and anyway, “In all, I think we are safer here.”