The two countries with the greatest shares of the world's Jewish population are the United States and Israel. The United States had been a hub of Jewish immigration since the nineteenth century, as Jewish people sought to escape persecution in Europe by emigrating across the Atlantic. The Jewish population in the U.S. is largely congregated in major urban areas, such as New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, with the New York metropolitan area being the city with the second largest Jewish population worldwide, after Tel Aviv, Israel. Israel is the world's only officially Jewish state, having been founded in 1948 following the first Arab-Israeli War. While Jews had been emigrating to the holy lands since the nineteenth century, when they were controlled by the Ottoman Empire, immigration increased rapidly following the establishment of the state of Israel. Jewish communities in Eastern Europe who had survived the Holocaust saw Israel as a haven from persecution, while the state encouraged immigration from Jewish communities in other regions, notably the Middle East & North Africa. Smaller Jewish communities remain in Europe in countries such as France, the UK, and Germany, and in other countries which were hotspots for Jewish migration in the twentieth century, such as Canada and Argentina.

The world's Jewish population has had a complex and tumultuous history over the past millennia, regularly dealing with persecution, pogroms, and even genocide. The legacy of expulsion and persecution of Jews, including bans on land ownership, meant that Jewish communities disproportionately lived in urban areas, working as artisans or traders, and often lived in their own settlements separate to the rest of the urban population. This separation contributed to the impression that events such as pandemics, famines, or economic shocks did not affect Jews as much as other populations, and such factors came to form the basis of the mistrust and stereotypes of wealth (characterized as greed) that have made up anti-Semitic rhetoric for centuries. Development since the Middle Ages The concentration of Jewish populations across the world has shifted across different centuries. In the Middle Ages, the largest Jewish populations were found in Palestine and the wider Levant region, with other sizeable populations in present-day France, Italy, and Spain. Later, however, the Jewish disapora became increasingly concentrated in Eastern Europe after waves of pogroms in the west saw Jewish communities move eastward. Poland in particular was often considered a refuge for Jews from the late-Middle Ages until the 18th century, when it was then partitioned between Austria, Prussia, and Russia, and persecution increased. Push factors such as major pogroms in the Russian Empire in the 19th century and growing oppression in the west during the interwar period then saw many Jews migrate to the United States in search of opportunity.

Jews were the dominant religious group in the Israel-Palestine region at the beginning of the first millennia CE, and are the dominant religious group there today, however, there was a period of almost 2,000 years where most of the world's Jews were displaced from their spiritual homeland. Antiquity to the 20th century Jewish hegemony in the region began changing after a series of revolts against Roman rule led to mass expulsions and emigration. Roman control saw severe persecution of Jewish and Christian populations, but this changed when the Byzantine Empire adopted Christianity as its official religion in the 4th century. Christianity then dominated until the 7th century, when the Rashidun Caliphate (the first to succeed Muhammad) took control of the Levant. Control of region split between Christians and Muslims intermittently between the 11th and 13th centuries during the Crusades, although the population remained overwhelmingly Muslim. Zionism until today Through the Paris Peace Conference, the British took control of Palestine in 1920. The Jewish population began growing through the Zionist Movement after the 1880s, which sought to establish a Jewish state in Palestine. Rising anti-Semitism in Europe accelerated this in the interwar period, and in the aftermath of the Holocaust, many European Jews chose to leave the continent. The United Nations tried facilitating the foundation of separate Jewish and Arab states, yet neither side was willing to concede territory, leading to a civil war and a joint invasion from seven Arab states. Yet the Jews maintained control of their territory and took large parts of the proposed Arab territory, forming the Jewish-majority state of Israel in 1948, and acheiving a ceasefire the following year. Over 750,000 Palestinians were displaced as a result of this conflict, while most Jews from the Arab eventually fled to Israel. Since this time, Israel has become one of the richest and advanced countries in the world, however, Palestine has been under Israeli military occupation since the 1960s and there are large disparities in living standards between the two regions.

The purpose of the study: assess knowledge of the Israeli population about Lithuania and its inhabitants. Major investigated questions: respondents were asked whether they heard about Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, whether they know much about these countries and could name their capitals, and finally whether they would like to visit these countries. Further, the questions were only related to Lithuania. It was wanted to know how much the respondents know about Lithuania and with which region they would most likely associate this country. Those who think that Lithuania is not worth a trip or who have doubts about visiting Lithuania were asked to give their reasons in group of questions. After a group of questions, respondents that formerly visited Lithuania were asked to answer what made them visit Lithuania, what they liked and what they did not like about the country. When asked to imagine that they were planning to visit a European country, and after being asked a group of questions, it was wanted to know what would have the most influence on such a decision. Respondents were asked to rate whether Lithuania's membership in the EU, NATO and the OECD was a positive or negative thing. Next, respondents rated the groups of statements about Lithuania. It was clarified whether they had seen the campaign "Lithuania. Real is beautiful". They were asked to answer which of the listed tourist attractions or activities would be interesting for them if they were to visit another country. It was investigated which positive and negative descriptions best describe Lithuanians. At the end of the survey, questions were asked about how often respondents travel abroad (including all types of travel: work, weekends, holidays) and who usually travels abroad with them. Socio-demographic characteristics: gender, age, place of residence, education, household income, occupation.

The Holocaust was the systematic extermination of Europe's Jewish population in the Second World War, during which time, up to six million Jews were murdered as part of Nazi Germany's "Final Solution to the Jewish Question". In the context of the Second World War, the term "Holocaust" is traditionally used to reference the genocide of Europe's Jews, although this coincided with the Nazi regime's genocide and ethnic cleansing of an additional eleven million people deemed "undesirable" due to their ethnicity, beliefs, disability or sexuality (among others). During the Holocaust, Poland's Jewish population suffered the largest number of fatalities, with approximately three million deaths. Additionally, at least one million Jews were murdered in the Soviet Union, while Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands and Yugoslavia also lost the majority of their respective pre-war Jewish populations. The Holocaust in Poland In the interwar period, Europe's Jewish population was concentrated in the east, with roughly one third living in Poland; this can be traced back to the Middle Ages, when thousands of Jews flocked to Eastern Europe to escape persecution. At the outbreak of the Second World War, it is estimated that there were 3.4 million Jews living in Poland, which was approximately ten percent of the total population. Following the German invasion of Poland, Nazi authorities then segregated Jews in ghettos across most large towns and cities, and expanded their network of concentration camps throughout the country. In the ghettos, civilians were deprived of food, and hundreds of thousands died due to disease and starvation; while prison labor was implemented under extreme conditions in concentration camps to fuel the German war effort. In Poland, six extermination camps were also operational between December 1941 and January 1945, which saw the mass extermination of approximately 2.7 million people over the next three years (including many non-Poles, imported from other regions of Europe). While concentration camps housed prisoners of all backgrounds, extermination camps were purpose-built for the elimination of the Jewish race, and over 90% of their victims were Jewish. The majority of the victims in these extermination camps were executed by poison gas, although disease, starvation and overworking were also common causes of death. In addition to the camps and ghettos, SS death squads (Einsatzgruppen) and local collaborators also committed widespread atrocities across Eastern Europe. While the majority of these atrocities took place in the Balkan, Baltic and Soviet regions, they were still prevalent in Poland (particularly during the liquidation of the ghettos), and the Einsatzgruppen alone are estimated to have killed up to 1.3 million Jews throughout the Holocaust. By early 1945, Soviet forces had largely expelled the German armies from Poland and liberated the concentration and extermination camps; by this time, Poland had lost roughly ninety percent of its pre-war Jewish population, and suffered approximately three million further civilian and military deaths. By 1991, Poland's Jewish population was estimated to be just 15 thousand people, while there were fewer than two thousand Jews recorded as living in Poland in 2018.

The Transatlantic Trends Survey, conducted June 6-26, 2004, was designed to assess respondents' opinions on their own and other countries' involvement in world affairs and events. The survey was administered to a sample of the population, 18 years and older, in France, Germany, Great Britain (with the exception of Northern Ireland), Italy, The Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain, Turkey, and the United States. Respondents were asked to give their opinions on the state of relations between the United States and the European Union (EU) particularly as they relate to issues of leadership and cooperation with respect to the War in Iraq, the larger war against international terrorism, and international security. Respondents were asked whether they preferred strong American leadership or a more dominant leadership role for the EU and whether they thought these issues had worked to draw the United States and the EU closer or distance them further. Respondents were also asked to evaluate the foreign policy decisions implemented by American president, George W. Bush. Respondents were asked what effects they thought the War in Iraq was having on terrorism and if the war had been worth it or not. Respondents were also asked how they would feel if their country was to withdraw troops or if withdrawn troops were to be sent back to Iraq. The survey then asked respondents for their opinion, more generally, on the use of military force and under what circumstances they would favor military intervention. The survey also sought to decipher whether respondents approved of unilateral military action or only if military action was sanctioned by their countries' allies, NATO, or the United Nations (UN). The survey also sought the respondents' opinions on a wide variety of other issues such as immigration, the AIDS epidemic in Africa, the Arab/Israeli conflict, Islamic fundamentalism, the international role of the UN, and the advantages and disadvantages to Turkey's admittance into the European Union. The survey also sought to obtain information regarding the respondents' political tendencies and party preferences. Finally, the survey attempted to identify the issues most important to the respondents. The data also includes several demographic variables that captured information regarding the respondents' sex, age, level of education, occupation, household size, region, and ethnicity (United States only).

Abstract copyright UK Data Service and data collection copyright owner.

The most fundamental questions vexing current commercial and public strategists in the information society arena are questions that can only be answered by longitudinal studies that measure the same individuals at different points in time. Whilst cross-sectional surveys tell us about penetration and access, they cannot tell us about the effects that these patterns have on people's lives, nor can they distinguish between gross and net patterns of change. Without longitudinal analysis we simply cannot tell if acquiring internet access leads directly to improvement of life chances, to a reduction in the time spent watching television and/or to an increase in communication with distributed family members. Nor can we tell if the 40% of the EU population who were internet users in 2001 are the same as the 30% who were users in 2000 plus a new 10%, or are actually a completely new group of people due to massive churn rates in internet subscription.

To address this problem the E-Living project, launched on 1st January 2001, is in the process of creating a co-ordinated set of pan-European longitudinal household panels specifically to generate quantitative data on the uptake and usage of information and communication technologies (ICTs) over time. The emphasis on longitudinal study marks this project out from the increasing number of cross-sectional surveys carried out for commercial, academic and public policy reasons. More information can be found on the E-Living: Life in a Digital Europe web pages.

For the third edition, new data files were deposited. These included additional partner diary data for Israel for Wave 2 and some income corrections for both waves. The documentation has also been updated.
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The dataset contains survey data on the uptake and use of information and communication technologies in six European countries (Norway, UK, Germany, Italy, Bulgaria and Israel) in 2001 and 2002, collected via Computer Assisted Telephone Interviewing (CATI), as a two-wave household panel study. The survey collected data on mobile telephony, personal computer (pc) and internet uptake and use as well as a wide range of indicators of social capital, social networks, quality of life, working conditions and employment and educational experiences, as well as standard socio-demographics.

Europe's Jewish population in 1939 was around 9.5 million people, and it is estimated that six million of these were ultimately killed by 1945. The persecution of German Jews escalated during the interwar period, particularly after Hitler's ascent to power in 1933, and again after Kristallnacht in 1938. However, the scale of this increased drastically following the German invasions of Poland in 1939 and the USSR in 1941, when Germany annexed regions with some of the largest Jewish populations in Europe. Extermination Camps As part of the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question", the Nazi occupiers established six extermination camps in present-day Poland; these were Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek***, Sobibor, and Treblinka. Prisoners, mostly Jews, were transported from all over Europe to these camps. Upon arrival, the majority of victims were sent directly to purpose-built chambers or vans, where they were murdered with carbon monoxide or Zyklon B gas. A relatively small number of prisoners were also forced to dispose of the victims' bodies, which often included their own family members, friends, or persons known to them. Most of the deceased were incinerated, and many of the camp records were destroyed; this means that precise figures for the number of deaths in extermination camps will never be known. It has been estimated that at least 2.7 million Jews were murdered in these six camps; over two thirds of these were killed at Auschwitz or Treblinka. Einsatzgruppen After extermination camps, the most common method of murder was through mass shootings. The majority of these shootings were not carried out by regular soldiers, but specialized task forces known as "Einsatzgruppen". Each group was just a few hundred men each, but they were responsible for some of the largest individual acts of genocide in the war. The largest of these took place at Babi Yar, near Kyiv in 1941, where almost 35,000 victims were beaten, humiliated, and then shot over a two day period. The Einsatzgruppen were most active in the annexed Soviet territories (although additional regiments were active in Poland and the Balkans), and their ranks were often bolstered by local volunteers. It has been estimated that Einsatzgruppen were responsible for the genocide of more than two million people in fewer than six years.