The Wandering Jew No More

"Only in [a] bizarro world and America would Islamism be considered Progressive."

"In reality, Islamism is the most regressive, misogynist, racist, exclusivist, supremacist of ideologies."

"Read Fida and Qutb, or keep on getting your Ivy League education through TikTok."

Hussain Abdul-Hussain, research fellow, Foundation for the Defence of Democracies

 

"In 2022, there was one resolution each to criticize Iran, Syria, North Korea, Myanmar and the United States for its embargo on Cuba."

"There were six resolutions last year on Russia because of its war in Ukraine. The total of all these is 13. Yet on Israel alone, the [General Assembly] passed 15 condemnatory resolutions."

"Not a single [General Assembly] resolution was introduced on the human rights situation in China, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, Cuba, Turkey, Egypt, Zimbabwe, Pakistan, Qatar, Vietnam, Algeria or 175 other countries."

Hillel Neuer, UN Watch

 

"One doesn't see the instant outpouring of emotions, the pain and anger, when Muslim populations across various conflict zones and under various dictatorial regimes suffer far more atrocities than the Palestinians."

Raheel Raza, Council of Muslims Against Antisemitism

Israel Defense Forces via AP

Accusations against evil-doing Jews are legendary throughout the ages; once held responsible for the Black Plague in the Medieval era, closer to our collective memory the Coronavirus Pandemic for which Jews were once again singled out as the cause of another catalyst of global collective death. Following the Roman Empire's putting down of a rebellion by Jews against centuries of domination/occupation by the Romans, when the Second Temple of Solomon was destroyed in the conflict and Jews were expelled from their ancestral homeland, a great diaspora took place when Jews were scattered all over the world.

Wherever they went on the globe, east, west, south, north, they were viewed with suspicion and frequently outright hostility. Their presence succeeded in benefiting the countries where they were allowed to settle, in technical innovations, scientific enquiry, medical progress and economic enterprise, but eventually they were hounded and expelled as they were in Spain and Portugal by the Inquisition. Expelled in Austria and Britain, eventually to return. In Eastern Europe land ownership was denied them, and pogroms resulted whenever area authorities wanted to divert the public's attention from their own administrative incompetence.

In Germany, where Jews were well established, proud of their assimilation into German culture, social and professional life, the final iteration of a carefully calibrated campaign of oppression, intimidation, threats and pogroms burst into a state-sponsored-and-designed elimination of the right to consider themselves human, as the machinery of annihilation of a people went into full gear. The world heard rumours of death camps but preferred to remain oblivious of state-organized slaughter on a scale never before imagined.

Genocide is a wound that can never heal, its perpetrators can never rehabilitate their nationhood, destroyed along with the uncountable human souls they destroyed. Jews realized throughout their endless mourning that the curse that followed them through an eternity of existence had lifted but it was a temporary reprieve. Now, Islam, a religious devotion sacred to an immense global population has offspring infected with a religious fervour to complete what European fascism aimed for.

A number of fanatical Islamist sources within the greater Islamic population treasure a covenant to destroy Jewish life and with it the reborn geographic heritage that led to the final chapter in the legend of the wandering Jew. Terrorist groups incited, armed, trained and loyal to genocidal regimes dedicated to the obliteration of the State of Israel. Their oil wealth and their interpretation of Islam's sacred scriptures lead them to the belief that it is their version of god that instructs them to commit genocide anew.

 

Palestinians taking Israeli hostage to Gaza ... AP

 

They have become skilled in the social-human art of propaganda and social conditioning inherent in 'public relations' where they portray themselves as avenging saviours of the world's longest-reigning 'victims' whom Jewish cunning and evil-mindedness has deprived of their freedom, their land, their hopes for the future. The ancestral homecoming of the Jewish diaspora enraged the Arab League and the UN's Organization of Islamic Cooperation. Arab armies combined to launch wars in 1948, 1967 and 1973 in the fledgling rebirth of Israel. They were repelled, defeated by the infinitely smaller, poorly equipped defence forces of the Jewish State.

"No peace with Israel, no negotiations with Israel and no recognition of Israel", was the guiding light of response from the Arab League following the 1967 war, when Israel's defence won territory in Egypt and Syria which it was willing to surrender for peace. The most recent war now takes place in Gaza, which Israel unilaterally surrendered to the Palestinians hoping the gesture would result in peace. The terrorist group Hamas had other ideas. Its covenant is clear; its goal is Israel's destruction.

There are many ways to destroy a people; one begins with slander that holds them to be less than human, accusing them of planning the wholesale death of others, of perpetrating the worst horrors imaginable upon helpless civilians, when in fact, they have engaged in conflict to inflict a penalty upon a conscienceless group of Islamist terrorists whose savagery mutilated and murdered Israeli civilians setting Israel on a course of destroying those that would destroy it and its people.

 

Elderly hostage from Kfar Azza kibbutz ... AP

"There is NOTHING anyone could do that would lead me to kill a child in cold blood, dismember a woman, slice her genitals, blow up parents in front of their children, laugh, sit and eat at their table." 

Shoshana Keats Jaskoll, Jewish activist and writer

Living In An Orwellian World

"[The fact that the court was willing to discuss the genocide charges was a] mark of shame that will not be erased for generations."

"We will continue to do what is necessary to defend our country and defend our people."

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu

Judges of the International Court of Justice are seen while ruling on a request by South Africa on behalf of Gaza on Friday. (Remko de Waal/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)

The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide established in 1948 represented a determination to ensure that the crimes of the Holocaust would never be repeated. The crime of genocide requires proof of intentional destruction "in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group". When the Third Reich destroyed the lives of six million Jews in a deliberate, state-planned eradication of Europe's Jews, it was the very quintessence of genocide. The intent was there, the outcome spoke for itself. 

Israel saw its founding that same year of 1948. It exists today as a bulwark against another Holocaust. Finally, Jews had a reborn national territory of their own established on a small portion of their original ancestral land. And that nation developed a military for the obvious purpose of defending itself and Jews from another attempt at genocide. The International Court of Justice delivered its provisional response to South Africa's claim of genocide perpetrated by Israel on Gaza, on the very memorial date of the Holocaust.

Could anything be more spectacularly grim and ironic? Israel, by the metric of the court consenting to hear the case and adjudicate it well into years ahead before reaching a final decision even while failing to order Israel to retreat from Gaza, has been held in suspicion of genocide, marking it as the fifth country to face the charge of genocide in the ICJ. As in the United Nations itself, it is always the human-rights-abusing nations that hold Israel to account for violations of human rights. 

 

Israel's violation can be seen in the fact of its existence, in the indisputable fact that it exists only because it defends itself.

Sudan committed an intended genocide in Darfur. And when its president and the head of the Sudanese military were condemned by the ICC as war criminals the Organization of Islamic Cooperation and the Arab League paid no mind. Syria's Bashir al-Assad has been accused by the United Nations itself of having killed 300,000 of its own citizens. Today he is in good standing in the Arab League. Iran threatens genocide against Israel, has done so openly, former President Ahmadinejad openly declared at the UN General Assembly Iran's intention to destroy Israel.

Open displays of of rampant antisemitism and the celebration of the Hamas terrorist bloody rampage through southern Israel on October 7 have taken place in huge rallies throughout the Western world. A world that stands by and merely observes 'pro-Palestinian' calls in gatherings on city streets calling for another intifada, calling for a Palestine 'from the river to the sea', calling for 'gas the Jews'. These are akin to the rallies and the vicious propaganda that presaged the Holocaust.

How can any rational mind support a charge of genocide against Palestinians by Israel, when the populations of both Gaza and the West Bank have risen steadily at a rate not seen elsewhere in the world? Of a people considered by the United Nations to be refugees. Whose leaders gather huge sums of funding from the international community free to plunder and amass personal wealth. And for Hamas to build a network of offensive tunnels while amassing a huge cache of weaponry. 

 

The target is Israel. The intent is there, the attacks are deadly. 

In Israel, 20% of the population is comprised of Palestinians. They have citizenship, a quality of life denied Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, while their leaders accumulate personal riches and deny proper administration of the territories that would allow the Palestinian people to prosper, have proper employment and live satisfying lives instead of being fed non-stop malicious lies about a neighbour hoping at some time to be able to relax its military vigilance.

Pro-Palestinian demonstrators gather outside the International Court of Justice in the Hague, the Netherlands, on January 26, 2024.

Nikos Oikonomou/Anadolu via Getty Images

Immediate Concern: 'Islamophobia' Afterthought: Antisemitism

"Our wholehearted support of the ICJ and its processes does not mean that we support the premise of the case brought forward by South Africa."

"Canada has long been a tremendous supporter of the international rules-based order and processes and structures that have been put in place over the past decades to be able to actually ensure that international law is respected and enforced."

"And the ICJ, [International Court of Justice], is a key part of that. Our wholehearted support of the ICJ and its processes does not mean we support the premise [genocide] of the case brought forward by South Africa."

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau

 

"Under the UN's 1948 Genocide Convention, the crime of genocide requires the intention to destroy or partly destroy a group because of their nationality, ethnicity, race or religion. Meeting this high threshold requires compelling evidence."

"We must ensure that the procedural steps in this case are not used to foster antisemitism and targeting of Jewish neighbourhoods, businesses and individuals. At the same time, we will continue to stand against Islamophobia and anti-Arab sentiment."

Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly

 

"This is the cynical Liberal strategy to say one thing to one group of voters and an entirely different thing to another group of voters ... while trying to have it both ways."

"[Whereas I am taking a] clear stand based on moral clarity [where a Conservative government would have outright rejected South Africa's claims]."

"This is not about genocide. It is about shamelessly and dishonestly attacking the Jewish people and the Jewish state, and the Conservative party stands against this dishonest approach."

Conservative Leader of the Official Opposition Pierre Poilievre

South Africa’s legal team inside The Hague. They are joined by justice minister Raymond Lamola, left, and ambassador Vusi Madonsela. Dursun Aydemir/Anadolu via Getty Images

There was an expectation that Canada would declare its official position as a two-day hearing on South Africa's genocide claim against Israel came into session. The Thursday deadline came and went, but now that waited-for declaration has been expressed and Canadians now know that their prime minister and his government feels there is justification for the case brought by South Africa, just not hinging the case on genocide, as a claim too far. 

 

And note, that whenever 'antisemitism' is brought up by Trudeau of his minister of foreign affairs, 'Islamophobia' requires equal billing.

This Liberal prime minister of Canada is a master of equivocation, carefully choosing his words so that the listener can take what comfort they can find in a refusal to entirely commit to an unequivocal response certain to offend one party and create jubilation for the other. Implicit in what he did say was that South Africa's charges are justified,  just that they went a little too far. Sitting on the fence can be useful in  areas where the truth and reality are opaque, but in this instance both are transparently clear.

And for his trepidatious caution Trudeau has pleased no one; the Jewish community in Canada suffering through the trauma of virally vicious antisemitism on public display held a glimmer of hope that their prime minister would finally commit to recognizing the existential reality of Israel's need to expunge the presence of a murderous terrorist group operating next door to ensure no promised repeats of October 7's sadistic horror of slaughter, mutilation, rape and abduction can recur. The position that Trudeau stated validated their growing belief that a whiff of antisemitism emanates from the PMO's sitting regent.

 

South Africa, a country that has made its hostility to the Jewish state abundantly clear in the past -- a country that saw nothing amiss in giving haven to Sudan's President Omar Hassan al-Bashir who was tried and found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity for his role in the Darfur genocide, sheltered while attending a 2014 African Union Summit, and whose friendship with Vladimir Putin also held to account for his invasion of Ukraine by the ICC -- demanded that the International Court of Justice order an emergency suspension of Israel's military actions in Gaza, against genocidal Hamas.

Israeli tanks re-enter Israel from Gaza, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, near the Israel-Gaza border, in southern Israel on Thursday. (Tyrone Siu/Reuters)

"The intent to destroy Gaza has been nurtured at the highest level of state. That is evident from the way in which this military attack is being conducted", stated Tembeka Ngcukaitobi, of the High Court of South Africa. The case brought to the ICJ by South Africa has seen support from a dozen countries, including Brazil, Colombia, Iran and Malaysia, along with the Arab League and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation. Hamas has heaped praise on South Africa for bringing a charge of genocide to the Court against Israel.

 

The U.K.'s stated position is that the prosecution is unhelpful, while the United States criticizes the prosecution as without merit and counterproductive. Most of the world has committed to no comment. Post-apartheid South Africa has long been a critic of Israel, while supporting the Palestinians. The African National Congress had ties with the Palestine Liberation Organization during the apartheid era. Bishop Desmond Tutu often condemned Israel for its 'oppression' of the Palestinians. While Nelson Mandela had a particularly chummy relationship with Yasser Arafat.

 

Needless to say, it is Hamas that has committed itself to genocide, stating so clearly in its charter that its purpose is to destroy Israel. A fairly obscene example of its intention took place on October 7 when Hamas operatives stormed the Israeli border and thousands of terrorists entered Israel, carrying out a series of bloody assaults that led to the deaths of infants and children, the elderly and infirm, entire families burned to death, and girls and women gruesomely raped and murdered. Yet it claims to be the victim, and Israel the genocidal aggressor.

Pro-Israeli protesters gather near the International Court of Justice (ICJ) as judges hear a request for emergency measures by South Africa to order Israel to stop its military actions in Gaza, in The Hague, Netherlands, on Friday. (Thilo Schmuelgen/Reuters)

Canadian Muslim members of Parliament persuaded Trudeau to have Canada vote in favour of a ceasefire in a non-binding motion of the United Nations General Assembly, a month ago. Some members of the Liberal caucus disagreed with the unconditional ceasefire call, going so far as to state that Canada had abandoned its "traditional position" on Israel. Minister of Defence Bill Blair stated that Hamas, which Canada considers a terrorist organization needs to be "eliminated as a threat" to the world.

 

Liberal Member of Parliament Salma Zahid considers that South Africa's application aligns with Canada's "long-stated commitment to the rule of law", while Iqra Khalid, her MP colleague, wrote of her support of the South African submission, that "credible allegations that international law has been violated must be investigated and those responsible must be held accountable".

"It's not at all a fair or balanced or nuanced accounting of the conflict [the 84-page application by South Africa]."

"It doesn't include any of the peace offers that were rejected by Palestinians, doesn't go into the trauma that the Israeli collective psyche suffered after something like the second intifada."

"It's just very slanted, and I understand, as a lawyer, for making their case for the Palestinian side, but it  as also shocking to me to see a sort of revisionist history of the Israel-Palestine conflict by South Africa."

Joanna Baron, executive director, Canadian Constitution Foundation 

Pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian protesters gathered near the ICJ in the Hague to watch the proceedings   Reuters

"[I find it] incredible [that the countries in support of South Africa have not accused Hamas of genocide, considering that its goal is to destroy Israel and is] backed by the Iranian government which seeks to annihilate the entire Jewish people."

"Why are they not bringing a case against China for its persecution of the Uyghur Muslims who are in concentration camps in that country? Why are they not going after [Syria’s] Bashar al-Assad who’s been carrying out a genocide against Sunni Muslims in that country?"

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre

ICC Prosecution for War Crimes

 

What is a war crime?  Even war has rules.

• The definition of war crimes are set out in treaties called the Geneva Conventions along with other international laws and agreements.
• Military forces cannot deliberately attack civilians -- nor the infrastructure that is vital to their survival.
• Some weapons are banned because of the indiscriminate or appalling suffering they cause -- such as anti=personnel landmines and chemical or biological weapons.
• The sick and wounded must be cared for -- including injured soldiers,who have rights as prisoners of war.
• Serious offences such as murder, rape or mass persecution of a group are known as 'crimes against humanity' or in some circumstances, 'genocide
  

Reuters

Russia and its president have been referred to the International Criminal Court repeatedly, in reflection of the crimes against humanity committed by the Russian military as a whole and by Russian servicemen in episodes of vicious brutality, including torture, rape, looting, murder. It was inevitable, given Russia's violent invasion of Ukraine, and witnessed, photographed and first-person accounts of crimes committed by Russia that the International Criminal Court would be involved in prosecuting the perpetrator of barbarism in a conflict of territorial expansion.

"We see clearly a pattern, I think, in terms of the number, scale and breadth of attacks against the power grids of Ukraine. And we need to look at why that’s taking place; are they legitimate targets or not; and whether or not they are targeted for other reasons." 

"Children cannot be treated as the spoils of war."

"There seems to be a lot of damage in Ukraine, and it may well be it is part of a policy and part of a plan and we need to get to the bottom of it and see whether or not there is criminal responsibility and if there is we have an International Criminal Court that has jurisdiction to look into it."

"As a prosecutor we are officers of the court. We are not here to get a round of applause by a conjuring trick. Whenever we do move, [people] should have confidence that this is not a political process."

ICC Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan

Mairupol theatre after the air strike    Reuters

The International Criminal Court has announced its preparation to initiate the arrest of Russian officials for their role in forcibly deporting children from Ukraine and for deliberately targeting civilian infrastructure. An unnamed source stated that arrest warrants could include the crime of genocide, expected to be served in the "short term" should the court prosecutor request be approved by a pretrial judge at the court based at The Hague.

Just as Russia, with its permanent seat on the United Nation Security Council vetoes any sanctions the other Security Council members, with China supporting Russia, bring forward, it is a foregone conclusion that it will use its weight at the UN to reject any such arrest warrants naming any Russian officials. An international war crimes prosecution would have the ultimate effect of pushing Moscow down a steeper diplomatic isolation incline. Russian officials named would theoretically find it difficult to travel abroad.

Dial back to the vicious assaults by the Sudanese military and its government on Sudanese Darfurians inspiring the International Criminal Court to prosecute the Sudanese president Omar Al Bashir and its head of military for 'genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in  Darfur, Sudan, since 1 July 2002' and the spectacle of Al Bashir travelling abroad to attend meetings of the Arab League where his presence was accepted and none there made a move to arrest him.

Moscow predictably denies deliberately targeting Ukraine's civilian infrastructure, insisting its attacks are merely intended to reduce Kyiv's fighting capacity. Russia feels it was completely legitimate to bring thousands of Ukrainian children to Russia as a humanitarian campaign meant to protect orphans and abandoned children from the conflict zone. Kyiv clarifies the situation, that thousands of Ukrainian children were deported to be adopted into Russian homes or placed in Russian camps and orphanages.

Exposed exclusively to a Russian education and ambience, given Russian passports, taught to be Russian and to reject their Ukrainian heritage, nationality and culture, the children are expected to consider themselves Russian. The genocvide convention of the United Nations defines 'forcibly transferring children of one group to another group' to be one of five acts prosecutable as genocide. 

The ICC can bring a prosecution against political leaders for "waging aggressive war". This covers an unjustified invasion or conflict not undertaken in self-defence.   Getty Images

Kyiv had taken its own prosecution action previously, conducting a few war crimes prosecutions of individual Russian soldiers accountable for incidents such as killings or rapes in occupied Ukraine territory. The prospective ICC prosecution would elevate the charges while targeting officials responsible for policies and not just the minions perpetrating such war crimes on the ground.

Russia is itself mindful of its diplomatic isolation, currying closer relations with those countries willing to overlook its barbaric war in Ukraine. The most senior and important to Moscow of which is Beijing. China's President Xi Jinping is on the cusp of visiting Russia, responding to a long-standing invitation. Just the kind of friendly support that President Vladimir Putin most appreciates at this vexing time from a powerful ally.

Rumour has it that President Xi may plan to speak by video link to Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Beijing has made overtures in the past to bring Moscow and Kyiv to peace talks, but Beijing doesn't make the rules and Moscow insists that Kyiv accept all the territorial gains that Russia feels it is entitled to, and for Ukraine to disarm, and disavow joining NATO. Unlikely prospects.

Beijing has just pulled off a diplomatic coup in persuading Saudi Arabia and Iran to set aside their long-standing polarizing issues which has brought them into conflict by proxy, in Syria and in Yemen. Iran, resenting Saudi Arabia's role as custodian of Mecca and Medina, aspiring to hold that role itself, the two nations, the Sunni-Islam Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Shiite Islamic Republic of Iran have agreed to restore diplomatic relations. Whether they will put a halt to battlefield hostilities is another matter.

"We do not recognize this court; we do not recognize its jurisdiction."

Vladimir Putin’s spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov

Getty Images

 

France's Betrayal of Its Jewish Citizens - Holocaust

"We will continue to teach against ignorance. We will continue to cry out against indifference. And we will fight, I promise you, at every dawn, because France's story is written by a combat of resistance and justice that will never be extinguished."

"We are not finished with antisemitism, and we must lucidly face that fact."

"It is showing itself on the walls of our cities [when they are vandalized with swastikas]. It is infiltrating social networks ... it inserts itself into debates on some TV shows."

"It showed itself in the complacency of certain political forces. It is prospering also through a new form of historic revisionism, even negationism."

"Let us repeat here with force, whether self-styled revisionist commentators like it or not."

French President Emmanuel Macron

"The policy, from 1942 onward, was to organize the murder of the Jews of Europe and therefore to organize the deportation of the Jews of France."

"Most of the time, the decisions were made by the Nazis ... but the management was French."

Jacques Fredj, director, Paris Shoah Memorial

Entrance to the Vel’ d’Hiv (the Winter Stadium, or Velodrome d'Hiver), where Jews were detained en-masse in preparation for their deportation to concentration camps in France.

 

Other French citizens ended up in concentration camps; committed French socialists who defied the Vichy government and their Nazi masters. In the camps they were in separate barracks from the majority camp occupants who were Jews. The French socialists bore difficult times, most of them managed to survive their ordeal. They empathized and pitied the Jews crammed into their barracks, the plight of the women and children, knowing well what that all-pervading odour both of fear and resignation and the stench of the smoke billowing out of the giant chimney signified.

 

Vivarais-Lignon, Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, in France in Feb. 2016.  Alamy Stock Photo

 

And there was a haven, in the mountains of southern France where Le Chambon residents harboured Jewish children, cared for them, hid them, nurtured them and brought them life and eventually even reunion with surviving family members. All at great risk to themselves, but determined to defy orders from the Nazis and from their own fascist Vichy government. Because of their activities, thousands of French Jewish children and Jewish children from other parts of Europe survived the war. They were Protestant French, surrounded by French Roman Catholics.

Jews living at a children's home in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, France, with their director, Juliette Usach, 1941. The people of Le Chambon and surrounding villages hid nearly 5,000 people fleeing Nazi occupation.

French police were entirely complicit with their Nazi overmasters; what the Nazis decreed, the French police carried out under the collaborationist Vichy government. In July 1942, French police went  house to house rounding up French Jews. It took two days where 13,000 men, women and children, all French citizens, were assembled to be dispatched to Nazi death camps. The Vel d'Hiv raids will forever be a black mark against France in the Second World War.

Police herded 13,142 French citizens of Jewish extraction, among them, 4,115 children into the Winter Velodrome of Paris (Vel d'Hiv). Western Europe had no rival to this large roundup where children were separated from their families, very few of whom survived the terrifying episode whose purpose was genocidal intent. There is a monument now, erected at a garden where once the velodrome stood. It holds the names of those thousands of children inscribed for posterity, so they will not be forgotten. Only six of those thousands of children survived.

A memorial is pictured near a train car symbolizing the Drancy camp, at the Shoah memorial, July 12, 2022 in Drancy, outside Paris (AP Photo/Thomas Padilla)

 

Renowned Nazi Hunter Serge Klarsfeld spoke in the garden on Saturday, an "earth shaking testimony to the horrors lived by Jewish families", he said of the garden and its memorial, stressing the urgency of passing on memories in the wake of the last of the survivors passing away. The following day the French president visited a site south of Paris where police sent families following the Vel d'Hiv roundup until they were sent on further to the Nazi camps.

There, in Pithiviers, a new memorial site honouring those French Jews was inaugurated, with a plaque reading: "Let us never forget". The Shoah Memorial in the Paris suburb of Drancy hosted another ceremony. Drancy was home to a transit centre central to the deadly journey to Nazi camps for French Jews. Of the 76,000 Jews deported from France under the collaborators of Nazi Germany in France, most transited the Drancy camp.

And now, in present-day Europe, Jewish communities are concerned with rising antisemitism throughout Europe; in France and in Germany in particular over recent years. The nation's Interior Ministry reports a rise in antisemitic acts, adding that racist and anti-religious acts are on the increase overall, while Jews are disproportionately targeted. 

Following the Second World War, fifty years passed before French leadership officially acknowledged state involvement in the Holocaust. Then-President Jacques Chirac apologized for the role of French authorities in the Vel d'Hiv raids. As President Macron said on Sunday, none of France's Vichy wartime leaders "wanted to save Jews".

French policemen register foreign Jews in Pithiviers for their subsequent deportation, in May 1941.- (AFP)

The Vital Imperative of Remembrance

"It is where it all began for the Jewish community, and it has such historical significance."

"It's going to be eco-friendly. It's going to have a memorial garden. It's going to be a beautiful space. It's going to be a hub of research and education. It's going to have a beautiful auditorium with 150 places." "It's going to have a gallery that can host temporary exhibits."

Richard Schnurback, president, Montreal Holocaust Museum 

"It will transform the landscape of the area. It will help to revitalize downtown and so we feel we're really contributing to our city in a significant way as we all hope eventually to come out of this pandemic."

"We expect it to be an internationally renowned, world-class institution and an architectural statement."

"It will be a gathering place for other communities who have been targeted by genocide, for the local population, for students, for tourists. We are going to be a warm, welcoming, accessible space that draws people in and that transforms them and encourages them to stand up today, to act, to remember."

Dorothy Zalcman Howard, co-president, Montreal Holocaust Museum renewal project

"We've outgrown our physical facilities and we have to regularly refuse school groups."

"This museum will really be Canada's Holocaust Museum. It will tell the story of the Holocaust and also talk about the Montreal survivors, people who came to Canada, to Quebec, and helped to build our city."

Julia Reitman, campaign cabinet president, Montreal Holocaust Museum

Eva Kuper, standing in front of the Montreal Holocaust Museum, tells how her life was saved just as she and her mother were being loaded onto cattle cars for transport away from the Warsaw Ghetto

 

"[The] relocation to downtown Montreal should allow increased accessibility and that is all the more necessary, as we have seen in recent days."

"Unfortunately, many people are not sufficiently aware of the Holocaust and of the consequences and the lingering after-affects of that tragedy."

"Let's hope that having a museum that allows us to better understand this reality will lead people who have trivialized the use of the yellow star and trivialized certain Nazi symbols in the past few months to reflect." 

Benoit Charette, Quebec minister of Culture

A collection of yellow stars, worn by Jews during the Holocaust, is one of the many exhibits by the Montreal Holocaust Museum. (Simon Nakonechny/CBC)

 

A museum, another museum dedicated to the premise that to forget is to airbrush history out of existence. Can there be too many museums and edifices whose sole purpose is to remind humanity of its obligations to ensure that the organized mass elimination of a people -- whose humanity had been denigrated amidst accusations of sinister conspiracies to rule the world, to establish themselves as an ethnic-religious-ideological world power, subjugating all other peoples to their command -- is never repeated?

A criminal, deliberately purposeful campaign undertaken by Nazi Germany to dehumanize Europe's Jews, to justify the Third Reich's carefully staged enterprise of delegitimization of what they labelled sub-humans belonging to a specific ethnic-religious group in preparation to launch a program of mass slaughter, one that would not raise objections among populations inured to compassion for the men, women and children slated for death, because they were exposed to a lethal hatred and believed that Jewish dominion over the globe must be stopped at all costs.

 

A German in a military uniform shoots at a Jewish woman after a mass execution in Mizocz, Ukraine. In October of 1942, the 1,700 people in the Mizocz ghetto fought with Ukrainian auxiliaries and German policemen who had intended to liquidate the population. About half the residents were able to flee or hide during the confusion before the uprising was finally put down. The captured survivors were taken to a ravine and shot. Photo provided by Paris' Holocaust Memorial.

 

The cost was six million lives. The European Jew-cleansing pogrom cost Jewish children their future, Jewish women and men their hopes, as they were gathered up, murdered en masse, buried in mass graves, used as slave labour, died of starvation and disease. And then the Final Solution seeking more efficient, quicker methods thought of Zyclone B to gas assembled Jews whose humanity had been stripped away, just as their worldly possessions, their hair, their gold rings and gold teeth were gathered to help the World War II effort of the Axis forces.

 

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.

 

This was their destiny; a giant sacrifice for their noble cause; ridding the world of Jews for the greater purpose of elevating Aryan qualities of physique, emphasizing the health virtues of abstaining from alcohol, smoking, poor nutrition, and global command of lesser nations. The golden mean of 'doing unto others as you would have them do unto you', underpinning Jewish traditions only emphasized their suffering as they cried out to the heavens for having abandoned them. Remembering the atrocities, the humiliations, the suffering is integral to modern Jewish life. 

The promise made Never to Forget was forged in blood and bone in memory of those whose lives were taken. So, no, such places of memorial and teaching must carry the torch of remembrance. There are far too many in today's world who doubt the very existence of a machinery vast enough and dedicated enough to have murdered six million Jews. And many among them feel the effort was halted before it could properly complete its goal. The spectre of once-hushed Jew-hatred has resurfaced with a vengeance.

 

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.

 

The Montreal Holocaust Museum's current location in a building shared with other Jewish community organizations has outlived its ability to convey the full measure of what fascist Germany accomplished. A mere 400 of its 14,000 artifacts are displayed, reflecting a lack of room to amply and effectively expose visitors to a fuller understanding of the Holocaust. With a purpose-built edifice for which funding is being raised, for construction to commence in 2023 in the expectation of the museum opening two years later, a generous endowment by the province's Culture Ministry of $20 million, another $15 million from the Azrieli Foundation, as well as public, corporate and private sources see the project on goal for $80 million.

The museum is to move from Cote Ste-Catherine Road to what once was the beating heart of the Montreal Jewish community, St.-Laurent Blvd., The Main. Where a parking lot now sits, a building to house the Holocaust Museum is to rise, with 71 percent of its funding already raised. Destination Montreal represented the third most important city per capita after Israel and New York, for Holocaust survivors leaving the charnel house of Europe for a new beginning. Of the roughly 40,000 survivors immigrating to Canada after the Second World War, 9,000 arrived in Montreal.

Among the museum's collection, there are 858 recorded survivor testimonies. Research indicates that people who learn about the Holocaust are likelier to be aware of and to care about other communities, to oppose persecution and to tend to develop anti-racist values. "For so many victims, there are no places that mark their existence. In a way, we are their voices. We are the repository for those people who were killed. We tell some of their stories and we encourage future generations to care about what happened and to translate those stories so they find expression in their own times", explained Dorothy Salcman Howard.

An urn containing ashes from the Auschwitz concentration camps sits surrounded by the names of other Nazi extermination camps at the Montreal Holocaust Museum. (Simon Nakonechny/CBC)

Did You Know?

"Did you know that at Auschwitz, when they ran out of Zyklon B, the guards for a bit of a joke would grab newly born babies and young children, open up the ovens and throw them in alive for the fun of hearing them scream?"

"Line after line of naked people, including women and children, thousands, would be shot and fall into a pit -- and watching it were people having a picnic, as spectators, with wine and cheese and bread and dogs running about."

"The point is that the men who were having a lark killing babies in Auschwitz and organizing -- even filming -- the public slaughters in those villages in almost every case got away with it and went on to have children of their own, and live respectable, untroubled lives -- hundreds of them here in Britain"

"Even with the current fuss about this being the75th anniversary of the Nuremberg Trials, the appalling, shameful fact is that 99-plus percent of those who committed what I believe to be the worst crimes in history were never even questioned about them."

David Wilkinson, 65, actor and film director

A mass burial pit at the 9th Fort Kaunas, Lithuania where Robin Lustig’s German grandmother was murdered    Greenlit

Actor/Director David Wilkinson is a man with a mission. He is not Jewish. He is nonetheless appalled that those who took delight in the atrocities committed against Jews in Europe during World War II -- when Nazi Germany vowed to extinguish the lives of every Jew in Europe for starters until the Third Reich succeeded in vanquishing all opposition to world control -- suffered no consequences though they were not merely onlookers but enablers and participants in the execution of the Holocaust, an institutionalized state genocide where both Axis countries and the countries occupied by Germany facilitated the Nazi Final Solution.

A friend and kindred spirit of David Wilkinson, dramatist Sir Ronald Harwood, a Jew, knew of his commitment and gave him some advice about how to proceed with his denouement: "Before he died last year Ronnie said 'You must explain to people that you're doing it because you're angry and ashamed at the injustice, not because you've got an axe to grind'." And how better to demonstrate that than to execute his documentary without the presence of Jews, by using a cast comprised completely of non-Jews to reinforce the reality that this was, while a Jewish tragedy of untold proportions, it was also a universal human tragedy and travesty of justice.

96-year-old Irmgard Furchner is accused of involvement in the deaths of 65,000 people among whom were 28,000 Jews, murdered in the concentration camp where she worked, where thousands died in the gas chambers in the camp while others were clubbed to death, drowned in mud, killed by lethal injection, shot, or were worked to death as slave labourers. She is accused of knowing what was happening but getting on with her work regardless. What a shame; holding a 96-year-old German national responsible for events that happened so long ago. What a miracle, a 99-year-old Jewish woman who survived, is testifying against her.

Across all of eastern Europe in towns and villages where Jews lived amongst their non-Jewish counterparts, Einsatzgruppen, special paramilitary German killing squads rounded up Jews with the help of their neighbours, and led them to areas outside town, usually areas whose geological features included a ravine -- alternately the Jews were given shovels and ordered to dig deep ditches -- after which they were informed they must strip off all their clothing, and stand at the edge of the ravine/ditch where lines of soldiers strafed them with bullets and they fell into the receiving hollow, some still living, to be buried alive with the dead. One of the most infamous was Babi Yar.

What David Wilkinson learned about the Holocaust incensed him with its barbaric inhumanity. What David Wilkinson learned about the punishment meted out to those responsible astonished and infuriated him. Well of course there were the Nuremberg Trials, a showpiece of justice where the movers and shakers of Hitler's death machine tasked to complete a mission to free the world of the presence of Jewish scum, stood trial and pleaded "Nicht Schuldig!" and were sentenced for their crimes, held responsible despite their attestation of following orders.

David Wilkinson, the offended non-Jew went on to produce a documentary titled Getting Away With Murder(s) coinciding with the anniversary of the Nuremberg Trials at a time when the aged survivors of concentration-, slave-labour- and death-camps are vanishing through natural life-spans running their course. A time when Helmut Oberlander, formerly a member of a German killing squad who immigrated to Canada under false pretence in 1954 fought deportation to Germany to stand trial, resisting for 35 years, appealing the government's continued efforts to revoke his citizenship and deport him. He lived to age 97 on the cusp of deportation.

Mr. Wilkinson's film was 18 years in the making, mostly self-financed and aided by film industry friends. One of the narrators in the production emphasized the unbelievable fact that close to a million enablers and participants in the murder of six million Jews faced no punishment. These were the 'little minnows' who slipped through the nets of the machinery of justice busy prosecuting the readily recognizable 'big fish', though they were all live-feeding carnivores to greater or lesser degree. 

The focus moves from one malefactor to another in the three-hour-long film. There is the man
Anthony Sawoniuk who lived in a council flat in Bermondsey for 40 years who had  worked as a ticket collector at London bridge station, a Byelorussian collaborator known to have murdered 15 women ordered to undress, spraying them with a machine gun, then shoving them into pits. He was tried in 1999 and died six years later in prison, the sole convicted war criminal in Britain of the over 400 living in the United Kingdom.

Lithuanian Anton Gecas helped in the execution of close to 40,000 Jews and Russian prisoners of war, and lived in Scotland from 1947 where he attended Heriot Watt University and worked for the National Coal Board. Eventually he operated a popular Edinburgh bed and breakfast. The Lithuanian authorities attempted to have him extradited but to no avail and he died in 2001 age 85, in Edinburgh. Two former members of the Ukrainian Self Defence Legion known as the 14th Waffen SS, lived freely in Nottingham until their deaths in the 2000s. 

Malka Levine, originally from Volodymyr-Volynskyi in Ukraine lives in the university suburb of Beeston, Nottingham, one of 30 survivors of a massacre of 25,000 Jews by the two, Anton Jurczuk and leksa Fedoryn's Waffen SS unit. She had survived the massacre when a farmer hid her as a baby along with others in her family under his barn. Unaware that men who were involved in the murder of her family and neighbours lived close by, she learned of their presence when she was interviewed by David Wilkinson. 

"She was horrified that she could have been on the bus or in the supermarket next to one of them", explained Mr. Wilkinson. "Their names are clearly on duty rosters from that time [back in Ukraine]." And then there was Johanna Altvater, a German who was tried in 1978 and in 1982 where she defended herself as having been a mere secretary. Both times she was acquitted and died just before her 85th birthday. She had been a council youth worker in her German hometown. She had entered a small hospital of sick children in Malka Levine's home town in Ukraine and began throwing children out of a third-floor window, injuring some, killing others.

The first deputy commander of Sobibor extermination camp in Poland was Gustav Wagner, known as The Beast, who ran the selections process that determined whether people would go to the line of slave labourers or to the gas chambers where 250,000 Jews were murdered. He escaped to Brazil after being sentenced to death in absentia. Extradition requests to Brazil went rejected. At age 69 in 1980 he was found with a knife in his chest, said to have been a death by suicide.

The litany of atrocities is mind-numbing. The 'Butcher of Riga', Herberts Cukurs, was a Latvian national hero, a prewar aviator who went on to take part in the mass murder of over 30,000 Latvian Jews. In 1941 he ordered that an elderly Jewish man must rape a young Jewish woman. Prisoners who looked away were beaten to death by Cukurs himself. The soviets attempted without success to extradite him  after he escaped to Brazil post-war. Eventually Israeli Mossad agents in Uruguay assassinated him in 1965, aged 64.

 (Photo: Guerilla Films)

"Many of the Germans just moved back to their hometowns and resumed life under their own name. The notorious Dr.Josef Mengele himself travelled back from Argentina to Germany under his own name twice, stayed in his hometown and was sheltered there by nuns. It seems only the police were unaware he had returned for a visit."

"[There are hundreds of Nazis with similar stories] But I just want people to be aware that we know the exact identities and often the addresses of the many culprits who got away with murder -- and that hundreds of them lived here in the U.K."

David Wilkinson, producer, documentary Getting Away With Murder(s)

Holocaust of Bullets : Babi Yar

An order was posted throughout the city in both Russian and Ukrainian:  "Kikes of the city of Kiev and vicinity! On Monday, September 29, you are to appear by 7:00 A.M. with your possessions, money, documents, valuables and warm clothing at Dorogozhitshaya Street, next to the Jewish cemetery. Failure to appear is punishable by death." From the cemetery, the Jews were marched to Babi Yar, a ravine only two miles from the center of the city. A truck driver at the scene described what he saw:

"I watched what happened when the Jews – men, women and children – arrived. The Ukrainians led them past a number of different places where one after another they had to remove their luggage, then their coats, shoes, and overgarments and also underwear. They had to leave their valuables in a designated place. There was a special pile for each article of clothing. It all happened very quickly … I don't think it was even a minute from the time each Jew took off his coat before he was standing there completely naked…. Once undressed, the Jews were led into the ravine which was about 150 meters long and 30 meters wide and a good 15 meters deep…When they reached the bottom of the ravine they were seized by members of the Schultpolizei and made to lie down on top of Jews who had already been shot. That all happened very quickly. The corpses were literally in layers. A police marksman came along and shot each Jew in the neck with a submachine gun … I saw these marksman stand on layers of corpses and shoot one after the other … The marksman would walk across the bodies of the executed Jews to the next Jew who had meanwhile lain down and shoot him."  Jewish Virtual Library

Aftermath of the Babi-Yar massacre.  At least 34,000 Jews died here in late September 1941.

In 1939 Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia signed a non-aggression pact. Each prepared to divide to themselves as spoils of war, territories in eastern Europe. Russia carved up Poland and already dominated Ukraine as its own territory. And then, the pact that was meant to last a decade ended with Soviet Russia finding itself invaded by German forces in 1941. Code-named Operation Barbarossa, Soviet forces were taken completely off guard. A rapid German advance across a wide front encircled Kyiv, trapping four Soviet armies, killing or capturing over 600,000 Soviet soldiers.

German forces were followed by Einsatzgruppen into Kyiv, home to roughly 150,000 pre-war Polish Jews. Prior to the Nazi advance many Jews fled. There were mostly women, children the elderly and the infirm who remained in Kyiv. Heinrich Himmler had formed the Einsatzgruppen as specialized units tasked to eradicate tens of thousands of Jews, Roma, homosexuals and political dissenters in Poland. Once in Kyiv they launched a bloody slaughter, diligent in prosecuting the task for which they were trained.

Over a two-day period setting out on September 29, 1941, Kyiv's Jews were ordered to present themselves to be ushered to a ravine located just north of the city. There, their valuables were taken, they were stripped bare, and shot to death. According to files by SS units, 33,771 Jews were stripped of their lives. SS units continued to kill tens of thousands more people at Babi Yar; Jews, Roma, Communist Party officials and Soviet prisoners. 

A view of a symbolic synagogue, in the form of a collapsible wooden structure, commemorating the victims of Babyn Yar (Babiy Yar), one of the biggest single massacres of Jews during the Nazi Holocaust, during the opening ceremony, in Kyiv, Ukraine May 14, 2021. REUTERS/Gleb Garanich

This event, and others like them, both large and small, taking place in villages and towns throughout Europe, eradicated the nuisance presence of Jews, a high priority for Nazi Germany, accompanying the prosecution of a world-wide war. As an initial stage to a more ambitious project, to exterminate the entirety of European Jewry, the engineers of genocidal slaughter found the means being used much, much too slow. They were concerned as well over the impact of German soldiers' trauma in taking part of these atrocities.

And so they devised newer methods of disposing far more efficiently of Jews. Operating across Eastern Europe from Poland to Azerbaijan the Einsatzgruppen shot and buried, mostly dead, some still living people numbering over two million. Jews were assured as they were lured to slaughter points, that they would be deported to Palestine at a time when Palestinians referred to Jews living in traditional Judaean heritage geography. An inheritance from the time millennia earlier when the Roman Empire ruled the Middle East.

Because it was seen as far too inefficient to merely shoot Jews, Henrich Himmler had the Einsatzgruppen test gas units mounted on trucks where victims were murdered with deadly carbon monoxide. That too was simply not as efficient as the zealous genocidaires demanded. By November of 1941, two months following the Babi Yar slaughter, an industrialized extermination camp -- Belzec -- began construction. It would be the first killing centre devoted to the mass murder of Jews.

"In the months following the massacre, German authorities stationed at Kiev killed thousands more Jews at Babi Yar, as well as non-Jews including Roma (Gypsies), Communist officials, Soviet prisoners of war, and Soviet civilians. It is estimated that some 100,000 people were murdered at Babi Yar."

"The Soviet army liberated Kiev on November 6, 1943. In January 1946, proceedings in Kiev tried 15 members of the German police for the crimes at Babi Yar, with actress Dina Pronicheva, one of 29 survivors of the September massacre, testifying before the Soviet court."

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

 

 

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.