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Global Jewish population still short of pre-Holocaust figure

According to Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics, there were 14.7 million Jews worldwide at the end of 2018, which is 100,000 short of the 1925 figures and far short of the 16.6 million estimated to have been alive on the eve of the Second World War in 1939.

A security guard stands in the empty Hall of Names at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Museum in Jerusalem on April 19, 2020. Photo by Yonatan Sindel/Flash90.
A security guard stands in the empty Hall of Names at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Museum in Jerusalem on April 19, 2020. Photo by Yonatan Sindel/Flash90.

Eighty-one years after the Holocaust, the global Jewish population is still short of the 16.6 million estimated to have been alive on the eve of the war in 1939, with Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics reporting ahead of Yom Hashoah that there were 14.7 million Jews worldwide at the end of 2018.

According to the IBS, the global Jewish population is 100,000 short of the 1925 figure, with 45 percent living in Israel (6.7 million).

The United States has the second-largest Jewish population at 5.7 million, followed by France (450,000), Canada (392,000), the United Kingdom (292,000), Argentina (180,000), Russia (165,000), Germany (180,000) and Australia (116,000).

Yom Hashoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day, is marked in Israel on the 27th of the Hebrew month of Nissan to pay tribute to Jewish resistance on the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

This year, Yom Hashoah falls from Monday night to Tuesday night, April 20-21.

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