Restoring a Pre-Holocaust Lost Population

The arrival and processing of an entire transport of Jews from Carpatho-Ruthenia, a region annexed in 1939 to Hungary from Czechoslovakia, at Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp in Poland, in May of 1944. The picture was donated to Yad Vashem in 1980 by Lili Jacob.  AP Photo/Yad Vashem Photo Archives

"The Jewish population has not returned to what it was before the war, so this is quite impressive to think that the Holocaust of the Jews is still visible. The damage is still visible and not yet recovered to its early dimensions."

"[Declining numbers in countries are attributed to] low birth rates, frequent intermarriage, identificational drift, aging, and emigration."

"[COVID-19] caused dramatic increase in the cases of death and decline in certain parts of the world, slowing [the] rate of growth." 

"Jews who also hold another religious identification [are excluded from the tally along with] non-Jews of Jewish ancestry [and non-Jews with] family connections to Jews."

"[A result of living in contemporary society is] much greater interaction with different groups. We wish to keep a definition which is more or less similar to what the situation was in past generations."

"If you wish to compare [the Jewish] population of today with a population fifty or 100 years ago, these interactions did not exist very much." 

Sergio Della Pergola, professor emeritus, co-author, annual survey, Hebrew University, Jerusalem

Israel: 6,153,500 (grew 10.2%)
United States: 5,700,000 (grew 5.1%)
France: 453,000 (shrank 5.6%)
Canada: 395,000 (grew 5.3%)
United Kingdom: 290,000 (shrank 0.3%)
Argentina: 180,300 (shrank 0.8%)
Russia: 172,000 (shrank 11.3%)
Germany: 116,000 (shrank 2.5%)
Australia: 113,400 (grew 1.3%)
Brazil: 93,200 (shrank 2.2%)

"The large Soviet Jewish population in areas that the Germans failed to occupy began to leave in the late 1970s because of discrimination in the U.S.S.R. and the possibility of a better life abroad."

"Similar stories on a much smaller scale occurred earlier in several Soviet bloc countries."

Professor Daniel Stone, study of Jewish history in the Soviet Union, University of Winnipeg

 

"Throughout history, the inherent weakness of a landless and powerless minority vis-a-vis territorially based societies and their constituted powers often put the Jewish people in a condition of dependency and instability, and translated into powerful ups and downs in the Jewish presence."

Institute for Jewish Policy Research study

The results of a demographic study of worldwide Jewish populations illuminates the fact that world Jewry has failed, over the course of 80 years since the beginning of the Second World War, to restore its presence to pre-Holocaust numbers. A reality that testifies to the success of the Nazi plan to destroy the presence of Europe's Jews. Europe, before the war, held a major share of the world's population of Jews. At the present time, Jewish presence in Europe totals 1.3 million, roughly 0.1 of its entire population. And of that number the presence of Jews in Europe is shrinking with time. 

 

Jewish deportees in the Drancy transit camp near Paris, France, in 1942, on their last stop before the German concentration camps. Some 13,152 Jews (including 4,115 children) were rounded up by French police forces, taken from their homes to the "Vel d'Hiv", or winter cycling stadium in southwestern Paris, in July of 1942. They were later taken to a rail terminal at Drancy, northeast of the French capital, and then deported to the east. Only a handful ever returned.  AFP/Getty Images

Two of every three Jews living in Europe during the war years was caught up in the vast genocidal project of Nazi Germany to exterminate all of Europe's Jews, an ambition that succeeded in annihilating six million Jewish children and adults. A systematic, collaborative plan that succeeded so well that numbers have still not returned to what they were pre-Holocaust. At the current level, the Jewish global community numbers almost 15 million people. In 1939 that number was 16.5 million, according to the World Jewish Population report of 2020.

 

Hebrew University of Jerusalem carries out an annual survey, drawing on data it finds available on 100 countries in a count of the core population of ethnic and religious Jewish numbers. Israel was seen with a strong positive growth rate in its Jewish population, an estimated 3% yearly growth, given a high birth rate and immigration. Stable or declining figures were seen elsewhere. Overall, there was a 92,400 increase from 2019 figures to 2020 in Israel. 46 percent of the world's Jewish population lives in Israel, with the United States accounting for 39 percent. 

 

German soldiers question Jews after the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943. In October 1940, the Germans began to concentrate Poland's population of over 3 million Jews into overcrowded ghettos. In the largest of these, the Warsaw Ghetto, thousands of Jews died due to rampant disease and starvation, even before the Nazis began their massive deportations from the ghetto to the Treblinka extermination camp. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising -- the first urban mass rebellion against the Nazi occupation of Europe -- took place from April 19 until May 16 1943, and began after German troops and police entered the ghetto to deport its surviving inhabitants. It ended when the poorly-armed and supplied resistance was crushed by German troops.  OFF/AFP/Getty Images

Canada is identified as one of the few countries where its demographic of Jews has been on a slow increase, centering in the Greater Toronto area, which includes people coming from "Russia, Israel and Iran". Canada is home to an estimated 400,000 Jews, representing the fourth-highest concentration of Jews in the world, according to the report. Most other countries' Jewish population were found to be in decline, to which "low birth rates, frequent intermarriage, identification drift, aging and emigration" are mostly attributed.

Israel's 'law of return' enables those of Jewish descent to immigrate, contributing to Israel's growth rate within the general population. Approaching numbers that existed before the catastrophic death toll of the Holocaust years "may take decades" more, the report stated. The population of Jews in Europe is lower than it has been in over a thousand years, and is declining further, according to a study from the Institute for Jewish Policy Research, issued in 2020. Some nine percent of the global Jewish population lives in Europe. It was almost 90 percent in the late 19th Century.

 

This photo provided by Paris' Holocaust Memorial shows a German soldier shooting a Ukrainian Jew during a mass execution in Vinnytsia, Ukraine, sometime between 1941 and 1943. This image is titled "The last Jew in Vinnitsa", the text that was written on the back of the photograph, which was found in a photo album belonging to a German soldier.   AP Photo/USHMM/LOC

France, the United Kingdom and Germany host most of the European Jewish population. Eastern Europe records the largest losses, much of it occasioned after the collapse of the former Soviet Union. A large majority of East European Jews were murdered during the Holocaust, leading to many survivors vacating territories post-WWII they considered to be hostile to their presence. Those Jews who lived in Poland, and Soviet citizens had the highest casualties during the Holocaust, according to figures produced by the U.S.Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Close to two million Jews in the past half-century, left Eastern Europe, in search of better opportunities, while countries in Western Europe saw a loss of some 8.5 percent of their Jewish populations.