Decades after Holocaust, Jewish population has yet to recover
74 years after the Nazi-perpetrated Holocaust which killed six million Jews ended, the Jewish population around the world has not recovered to its pre-1940 numbers, a special Yom HaShoah report published by Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics shows.
A yellow patch of a Holocaust survivor next to the WWII helmet of a Nazi soldier whom he killed after the war. Photo by Ehud Amiton/TPS
At the end of 2018, the number of Jews worldwide was 14.7 million, close to that of the Jewish world in 1925, which stood at 14.8 million.
However, in 1939, on the eve of World War II, the number of Jews in the world was 16.6 million, of which 449,000, a mere 3%, were in Israel.
In 1948, on the eve of the establishment of the State of Israel, the number of Jews in the world was 11.5 million, of whom 650,000 were in Israel, doubling the Jewish population in Israel to 6% of world Jewry.
Of the 14.7 million Jews in the world today, 6.7 million are in Israel, some 7.5 million are in the US, 450,000 are in France, 392,000 in Canada, 292,000 in the United Kingdom, 180,000 in Argentina, 165,000 in Russia, 118,000 in Germany, and 116,000 in Australia.
Today, 45% of Jews worldwide live in Israel, of whom 5.2 million were born in Israel and 1.5 million were born abroad.
The year 2019 saw a peak in Aliyah, with 34,872 Jews coming to Jewish State, a 20% increase over the 29,800 that came in 2018.
Israel welcomed more than 255,000 Olim from 150 different countries in the past decade.
Since the establishment of the state of Israel, 3.3 million people have made Aliyah, making up 42 per cent of the total population.
The CBS noted that in this report, Jews are defined as people who define themselves as Jews or people who are born to Jewish parents and who do not have a religious identity.
How do you define who is a Jew?
In Australia, it is a self definition which is declared in the census.
in Israel, it is defined by ancestry; if your mother is a Jew, so you are.
The statistics above do not take this different into account.
For example, many secular Israelis of jewish descent do not consider themselves as “Jews” but as “Israelis”. However, they are counted as Jews above.