Are you a non-native speaker of english at a lower-intermediate level? Because most conversational speakers of english would be able to successfully understand that it was implied as an ongoing process, while most lower-intermediate speakers tend to focus on grammar rules mechanically while having limited comprehension of everyday usage.
Ie, most of the people who left in 1990 had already begun their applications and prepared to emigrate in 1989 or even earlier, unless you believe that the crumbling soviet bureaucracy moved at lighting speed and that it was easy for jews in central Asia to travel thousands of miles and spend potentially weeks applying for an exit visa in Moscow.
Citing wikipedia as a primary source is something that wikipedia explicitly discourages, in part because so many articles are constantly being degraded in quality by extremist political partisans: scientologists, objectivists, zionists, stalinists, neo-nazis, etc. Clearly I have a grasp of the facts of the matter, so why are you splitting hairs if not to distract from the other things I said that you have no response to.
The link I posted (of which you have said nothing, nor have you attempted a defense of why the Israeli government shut down a Finnish transit point that allowed soviet Jews to choose between the US and Israel) puts the period between 1989 and 1993. Furthermore, it provides exhaustive and nuanced evidence that the Israeli state was strongly opposed to allowing soviet jews freedom of choice. Ironically, the Israeli political mainstream is quite similar to the Soviet Union itself, in both its curtailing of human freedom, crude propaganda lies, and ugly ethno-nationalism.
It is pretty absurd that you would have this evidence but be in such a strong state of dissonance that you're not willing to contest or process them, you're only trying to block them out.
That sounds to me like a developer who ignores technical debt, isn't capable of learning new ways of thinking or disagreeing rationally, and insists on endless bikeshedding of irrelevant minutia instead of dealing with actual facts. I've known several great expat Israeli developers, and more than one of them left Israel precisely because they found that engineers and politicians with attitudes like the one I've described are destroying Israeli economic and social life.