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.

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.

This statistic shows the top 25 countries in the world with the largest number of Jewish population in 2010. In 2010, there were living about 5.7 million Jews in the United States.

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.

Throughout history, the displacement and migration of Jewish populations has been a repeating theme. In ancient times, the worlds Jewish population was concentrated in the Middle East, especially around Judaism's spiritual homeland in present-day Israel. However, the population distribution of the world's Jewry began to shift in the Middle Ages, with an increasing share living in Europe. Initially, Western Europe (particularly France, Italy, and Spain) had the largest Jewish populations, before they then migrated eastward in later centuries. Between the 18th and mid-20th centuries, over half of the worl'd Jews lived in Europe, with over 80 percent of these living in Eastern Europe.

Poland had become a refuge for Jews fleeing persecution in the Middle Ages, although shifting borders and foreign influence meant that long-term security was never fully attained, and a series of pogroms in the Russian Empire in the 1800s, and rising anti-Semitism in Central Europe in the early-1900s contributred to waves of migration to the United States and Israel during this time. After the Holocaust saw the genocide of up to six million Jews (over one third of the world's Jewish population), the share of Jews living in Europe dropped drastically, and emmigration outside of Europe increased. Today, the United States has the world's largest Jewish population in the world at around 7.3 million people, just ahead of Israel with 7.1 million.

The Jewish population of Europe decreased dramatically during the 20th century, as millions of Jews were killed during the Holocaust of the Second World War, while millions of others emigrated to escape persecution (notably to Israel and the U.S.). Some estimates suggest that the total number of Jews in Europe in 1933 was approximately 9.5 million people, with the majority of these living in Eastern Europe. Jews were a minority in most countries, however they still made up a significant portion of the population in countries such as Hungary, Poland and Romania. Following the war however, the Jewish populations in these countries dropped drastically, and by the end of the century they made up just 0.1 percent or less in several countries.

In the Middle Ages, it is believed the largest Jewish populations in the world were found in Asia, particularly across the Middle East. Of the estimated total Jewish population of 1.2 million people, over 80 percent are thought to have lived in Asia, while 13 percent lived in Europe, and the remaining six precent lived in (North) Africa. The largest populations were found on the Arabian peninsula, as well as Iran and Iraq, while the Near East (here referring to the Levant region) had a much smaller population, despite being the spiritual homeland of the Jewish people.

These figures are based on the records of Benjamin of Tudela, a Jewish traveller from the Middle Ages who provided one of the most comprehensive collections of population statistics from the period. Benjamin's writings not only recorded the number of Jews living across this part of the world, but also gave an insight into societal structures and the ordinary daily lives within Jewish communities in the medieval period. The source providing these figures, however, has adjusted some of the statistics to account for known populations that were missing from Benjamin of Tudela's records, especially in Europe and Asia.

Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism (ISCA) at Indiana University Dataset on bias against Asians, Blacks, Jews, Latines, and Muslims

The ISCA project compiled this dataset using an annotation portal, which was used to label tweets as either biased or non-biased, among other labels. Note that the annotation was done on live data, including images and context, such as threads. The original data comes from annotationportal.com. They include representative samples of live tweets from the years 2020 and 2021 with the keywords "Asians, Blacks, Jews, Latinos, and Muslims". A random sample of 600 tweets per year was drawn for each of the keywords. This includes retweets. Due to a sampling error, the sample for the year 2021 for the keyword "Jews" has only 453 tweets from 2021 and 147 from the first eight months of 2022 and it includes some tweets from the query with the keyword "Israel." The tweets were divided into six samples of 100 tweets, which were then annotated by three to seven students in the class "Researching White Supremacism and Antisemitism on Social Media" taught by Gunther Jikeli, Elisha S. Breton, and Seth Moller at Indiana University in the fall of 2022, see this report. Annotators used a scale from 1 to 5 (confident not biased, probably not biased, don't know, probably biased, confident biased). The definitions of bias against each minority group used for annotation are also included in the report. If a tweet called out or denounced bias against the minority in question, it was labeled as "calling out bias." The labels of whether a tweet is biased or calls out bias are based on a 75% majority vote. We considered "probably biased" and "confident biased" as biased and "confident not biased," "probably not biased," and "don't know" as not biased.
The types of stereotypes vary widely across the different categories of prejudice. While about a third of all biased tweets were classified as "hate" against the minority, the stereotypes in the tweets often matched common stereotypes about the minority. Asians were blamed for the Covid pandemic. Blacks were seen as inferior and associated with crime. Jews were seen as powerful and held collectively responsible for the actions of the State of Israel. Some tweets denied the Holocaust. Hispanics/Latines were portrayed as being in the country illegally and as "invaders," in addition to stereotypical accusations of being lazy, stupid, or having too many children. Muslims, on the other hand, were often collectively blamed for terrorism and violence, though often in conversations about Muslims in India.

Content:

This dataset contains 5880 tweets that cover a wide range of topics common in conversations about Asians, Blacks, Jews, Latines, and Muslims. 357 tweets (6.1 %) are labeled as biased and 5523 (93.9 %) are labeled as not biased. 1365 tweets (23.2 %) are labeled as calling out or denouncing bias. 1180 out of 5880 tweets (20.1 %) contain the keyword "Asians," 590 were posted in 2020 and 590 in 2021. 39 tweets (3.3 %) are biased against Asian people. 370 tweets (31,4 %) call out bias against Asians. 1160 out of 5880 tweets (19.7%) contain the keyword "Blacks," 578 were posted in 2020 and 582 in 2021. 101 tweets (8.7 %) are biased against Black people. 334 tweets (28.8 %) call out bias against Blacks. 1189 out of 5880 tweets (20.2 %) contain the keyword "Jews," 592 were posted in 2020, 451 in 2021, and ––as mentioned above––146 tweets from 2022. 83 tweets (7 %) are biased against Jewish people. 220 tweets (18.5 %) call out bias against Jews. 1169 out of 5880 tweets (19.9 %) contain the keyword "Latinos," 584 were posted in 2020 and 585 in 2021. 29 tweets (2.5 %) are biased against Latines. 181 tweets (15.5 %) call out bias against Latines. 1182 out of 5880 tweets (20.1 %) contain the keyword "Muslims," 593 were posted in 2020 and 589 in 2021. 105 tweets (8.9 %) are biased against Muslims. 260 tweets (22 %) call out bias against Muslims.

File Description:

The dataset is provided in a csv file format, with each row representing a single message, including replies, quotes, and retweets. The file contains the following columns:
'TweetID': Represents the tweet ID.
'Username': Represents the username who published the tweet (if it is a retweet, it will be the user who retweetet the original tweet.
'Text': Represents the full text of the tweet (not pre-processed). 'CreateDate': Represents the date the tweet was created.
'Biased': Represents the labeled by our annotators if the tweet is biased (1) or not (0). 'Calling_Out': Represents the label by our annotators if the tweet is calling out bias against minority groups (1) or not (0). 'Keyword': Represents the keyword that was used in the query. The keyword can be in the text, including mentioned names, or the username.

Licences

Data is published under the terms of the "Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International" licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0)

Acknowledgements

We are grateful for the technical collaboration with Indiana University's Observatory on Social Media (OSoMe). We thank all class participants for the annotations and contributions, including Kate Baba, Eleni Ballis, Garrett Banuelos, Savannah Benjamin, Luke Bianco, Zoe Bogan, Elisha S. Breton, Aidan Calderaro, Anaye Caldron, Olivia Cozzi, Daj Crisler, Jenna Eidson, Ella Fanning, Victoria Ford, Jess Gruettner, Ronan Hancock, Isabel Hawes, Brennan Hensler, Kyra Horton, Maxwell Idczak, Sanjana Iyer, Jacob Joffe, Katie Johnson, Allison Jones, Kassidy Keltner, Sophia Knoll, Jillian Kolesky, Emily Lowrey, Rachael Morara, Benjamin Nadolne, Rachel Neglia, Seungmin Oh, Kirsten Pecsenye, Sophia Perkovich, Joey Philpott, Katelin Ray, Kaleb Samuels, Chloe Sherman, Rachel Weber, Molly Winkeljohn, Ally Wolfgang, Rowan Wolke, Michael Wong, Jane Woods, Kaleb Woodworth, and Aurora Young. This work used Jetstream2 at Indiana University through allocation HUM200003 from the Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Coordination Ecosystem: Services & Support (ACCESS) program, which is supported by National Science Foundation grants #2138259, #2138286, #2138307, #2137603, and #2138296.

With the heightened threat to Germany's Jewish population following the Nazi Party's ascent to power in 1933, many German Jews chose to flee or emigrate. In 1933, Germany's Jewish population was approximately 500,000 people; by the end of the war, it is estimated that 300,000 fled the country, and 165,000 were murdered in the Holocaust. In order to flee, most Jewish emigrants from Germany had to give up the majority of their wealth to the German state, whose emigration tax and seizure of property stripped Jews of their financial assets. Destination and transit For Germany's Jewish refugees, the most common destination country was the United States, and almost half of all these refugees would arrive in the U.S. over this 12 year period. As the United States had a strict quota of 27,000 German migrants per year, many refugees were forced to enter via other countries. France was the second most common destination country, receiving 100,000 refugees. However, France was also used as a transit country for German Jews wishing to travel further afield, especially after it was annexed by Germany in 1940. This was also true for several other European countries, such as the Netherlands, which had provided protection for German Jews in the mid-1930s, before rapidly becoming very unsafe following the outbreak of war in 1939. The Frank family Possibly the most famous example of this was the story of Anne Frank and her family. Anne had been born in Frankfurt, Germany in 1929, but her family moved to the Netherlands in 1934 after Hitler came to power. The family then led a relatively comfortable and successful life in Amsterdam, with her father, Otto, founding his own businesses. When the Netherlands was invaded by the Germans in 1940, the family tried to emigrate once more; Otto had been granted a single Cuban visa in 1942, but the family was forced to go into hiding as the restrictions tightened. For the next two years, with the help of non-Jewish friends, they lived in secret in the upper floor of Otto's business premises with several other Jewish refugees, in a small space concealed behind a bookcase. In August 1944, through unknown means, the group was betrayed and then arrested by Dutch authorities, and the Frank family was sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau thereafter. Anne's mother, Edith, died of starvation in Auschwitz within five months of her capture, while Anne and her sister, Margot, died one month later after being transferred to the Bergen-Belsen camp in Germany. Otto was the sole survivor of the group. Otto's secretary, Miep Gies, had saved Anne's diary the day after the group was arrested, which she then gave to Otto; he then devoted much of the remainder of his life to the publication and promotion of his daughter's diary, which has now become one of the most famous and widely-read books in recent history. Additionally, the hiding space is now open to the public, and has become one of the Netherlands' most popular tourist museums.

Institute For the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism (ISCA) at Indiana University Dataset:

The ISCA project has compiled this dataset using an annotation portal, which was used to label tweets as either antisemitic or non-antisemitic, among other labels. Please note that the annotation was done with live data, including images and the context, such as threads. The original data was sourced from annotationportal.com.

Content:

This dataset contains 6,941 tweets that cover a wide range of topics common in conversations about Jews, Israel, and antisemitism between January 2019 and December 2021. The dataset is drawn from representative samples during this period with relevant keywords. 1,250 tweets (18%) meet the IHRA definition of antisemitic messages.

The dataset has been compiled within the ISCA project using an annotation portal to label tweets as either antisemitic or non-antisemitic. The original data was sourced from annotationportal.com.

The tweets' distribution of all messages by year is as follows: 1,499 (22%) from 2019, 3,716 (54%) from 2020, and 1,726 (25%) from 2021. 4,605 (66%) contain the keyword "Jews," 1,524 (22%) include "Israel," 529 (8%) feature the derogatory term "ZioNazi*," and 283 (4%) use the slur "K---s." Some tweets may contain multiple keywords.

483 out of the 4,605 tweets with the keyword "Jews" (11%) and 203 out of the 1,524 tweets with the keyword "Israel" (13%) were classified as antisemitic. 97 out of the 283 tweets using the antisemitic slur "K---s" (34%) are antisemitic. Interestingly, many tweets featuring the slur "K---s" actually call out its usage. In contrast, the majority of tweets with the derogatory term "ZioNazi*" are antisemitic, with 467 out of 529 (88%) being classified as such.

File Description:

The dataset is provided in a csv file format, with each row representing a single message, including replies, quotes, and retweets. The file contains the following columns:

‘TweetID’: Represents the tweet ID.

‘Username’: Represents the username who published the tweet.

‘Text’: Represents the full text of the tweet (not pre-processed).

‘CreateDate’: Represents the date the tweet was created.

‘Biased’: Represents the labeled by our annotations if the tweet is antisemitic or non-antisemitic.

‘Keyword’: Represents the keyword that was used in the query. The keyword can be in the text, including mentioned names, or the username.

Licences

Data is published under the terms of the "Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International" licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0)

R code is published under the terms of the "MIT" licence (https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT) ‘

Acknowledgements

We are grateful for the support of Indiana University’s Observatory on Social Media (OSoMe) (Davis et al. 2016) and the contributions and annotations of all team members in our Social Media & Hate Research Lab at Indiana University’s Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism, especially Grace Bland, Elisha S. Breton, Kathryn Cooper, Robin Forstenhäusler, Sophie von Máriássy, Mabel Poindexter, Jenna Solomon, Clara Schilling, and Victor Tschiskale.

This work used Jetstream2 at Indiana University through allocation HUM200003 from the Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Coordination Ecosystem: Services & Support (ACCESS) program, which is supported by National Science Foundation grants #2138259, #2138286, #2138307, #2137603, and #2138296.

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 Long Shadow of Sobibor' is an interview project representing a unique historical document. The collection comprises open interviews taken by Professor Selma Leydesdorff with 9 survivors of the Sobibor revolt (1943) and 22 next of kin to persons murdered in Sobibor. These unique testimonials are far more than stories about camp life alone.--Stories of lives--The interviews are the stories of whole lives, in which people tell about the world that died with their relatives in Sobibor, and how they managed to continue with their lives without their loved ones. They recollect what the murder of their dearest ones or relatives did to them. Often they lost one or both of their parents. Those who survived the revolt that took place in Sobibor on October 14, 1943, also go into their lives before and after the extermination camp in their stories.--Great loss--All interviewees bear the marks of Sobibor. Both next of kin and survivors have severely disturbed lives; they all had to build a new existence after the war. Sobibor stands for wounds that never heal and for a world in which the great killing is always present. By giving these interviews and telling the stories of their lives, next of kin and survivors contribute to a better understanding of what it means to have to cope with an enormous loss. Thanks to their outspokenness Sobibor has become better known to the public.--Motivation--The trial of John (Iwan) Demjanjuk, the Ukraine-born camp guard who worked in the Sobibor extermination camp from March 26, 1943 till October 1, 1943, started November 30, 2009 in Munich, Germany. Co-plaintiffs played a major role during the trial.A number of next of kin to people murdered in Sobibor joined camp survivors in requesting to be heard during the Demjanjuk trial. These so-called co-plaintiffs played an important role in the Munich courtroom, once more due to the fact that Jews who were deported to Sobibor extermination camp from the Netherlands left behind almost no testimonials, and only a few survived.The co-plaintiffs were offered the opportunity to tell their own stories by Mrs Selma Leydesdorff. Many of them were ready to do so, resulting in this unique oral-history project. This way, many of the co-plaintiffs became story tellers. With this project Sobibor Foundation, having taken a lion's share in supporting the co-plaintiffs during the trial, hopes to strengthen them once more. By interviewing them they were given the opportunity to tell about their recollections in comfort and peace and to prepare for the trial. Furthermore, they contribute to the knowledge about Sobibor. Most interviews were held before, at the beginning and during the course of the trial.--Survivors--Apart from a large number of next of kin, Selma Leydesdorff also interviewed nine survivors of the revolt that took place on October 14, 1943. These are persons who as inmates did forced labour in the camp and narrowly escaped the killing machine in the course of the revolt. They either participated directly in organizing the revolt or were involved very closely. Their lives are marked by the war, Sobibor, and their aftermath as well.Deze collectie bevat 31 interviews met zowel nabestaanden van mensen die in Sobibor zijn vermoord als met Nederlandse, Poolse, Oekraïense en Russische overlevenden van de opstand in Sobibor (14 oktober 1943).De interviews zijn levensgeschiedenissen waarin de geïnterviewden vertellen over de wereld die zij hebben achtergelaten met de dood van verwanten in Sobibor, en hoe zij hun leven daarna hebben geleefd zonder hun geliefden. Nabestaanden vertellen wat de moord op hun naaste heeft betekend. Vaak gaat het om een of beide ouders. De overlevenden, van de opstand die op 14 oktober 1943 in Sobibor plaatsvond, gaan in hun verhaal ook in op hun leven voor en na het vernietigingskamp.KEYWORDS:Interviewees:Kins: Louis van Velzen, Lotty Huffener-Veffer, Constance (Pim) Combrink. Marcus (Marco) de Groot, David van Huiden, Ellen van der Spiegel Cohen, Mary Richheimer-Leijden van Amstel, Rob Wurms, Jan Goedel, Rob (Robert) Cohen, Philip Jacobs, Martin Haas, Nathan Hakker, Leida Keesing, Jaap (Jack) Polak, Rudie (Salomon) Cortissos, Jules Schelvis, Rudi Westerveld (Jaap Rudolf Isaac), Max Degen, Vera de Jong-Simons, Paul Hellmann, Geertruida (Truus) ZeehandelaarSurvivors: Thomas (Toivi) Blatt, Semion Rozenfeld (Semjon Rosenfeld, Semyon Rozenfeld, Simjon Rosenfeld), Simcha (Simha, Symcha, Simkha) Bialowitz, Selma (Saartje) Engel-Wijnberg, Alexsy Wajcen (Aleksej Waitsen), Philip Bialowitz, Esther Raab, Arkady Wajspapir (Arkadii Weisspapier), Regina Zielinski-FeldmanAlexander (Sacha) Pechersky, Alexander (Sasha) PecherskyDUTCH KEYWORDS:Joods leven / Jewish life: Asscher, Bar Mitswa, Besneden, Besnijden, Bijenkorf, Chanoeka, Choepa, De Bonneterie, diamant, falasha, gotspe, Hebreeuws, Jiddisch, Jiddische mama, Jiddische memme, Jizkor, Jom Kippoer, Kaddish, Liberaal Joodse Gemeente, LJG, Magen David, memme, mikwe, muziek,...

In 1995, Israel had a Jewish population of approximately 4.5 million people, of whom approximately 1.75 million were born abroad. Over one million of these immigrants were born in Europe, with over 650,000 of these born in the former Soviet Union. Despite Poland having the largest Jewish population in the world in the pre-WWII years, the number of Polish Jewish migrants and descendents in Israel was relatively small in 1995 when compared to the USSR due to the impact of the Holocaust.

Outside of Europe, Morocco had the largest number of Jewish immigrants and descendents in Israel by 1995. Morocco had the largest Jewish population in the Muslim world when Israel was founded in 1948, with over 250,000 people. Many Moroccan Jews sought to emigrate to Israel at this time, but often faced resistance from authorities and local populations who believed the Jews would join in the fight against the Arab forces seeking to establish a Muslim state in Palestine. The government of Morocco then officially prohibited emigration to Israel after gaining independence from France in 1956, however this policy was reversed in 1961 whereby the Moroccan government began facilitating Jewish emigration to Israel in return for payments from Jewish organizations in the U.S. and Israel. By the 1970s, Morocco's Jewish population had fallen to less than 15 percent of its size in 1948.

The United States is regarded as one of the most important partner of Israel. The two countries hold strong political, economic, and cultural relations. In a survey conducted in Israel in 2021, 90 percent of the Jewish self-identified left-wing respondents stated that they saw the United States as a friendly country. This political group had the most favorable opinion of the United States. However, many respondents who politically identified as center or right-wing supporters also saw the United States as an Israel-friendly country (80 percent and 71 percent, respectively).

Strong trade ties 

The United States is an important trade partner of Israel. In 2021, imports from the United States into Israel accumulated nearly 7.9 billion U.S. dollars. This was a slight increase compared to the previous year. Imports include machinery, electrical products, vehicles, and aircraft. In addition, in the same year, the value of exports from Israel to the United States reached 11.89 billion U.S. dollars, which was a considerable increase compared to the previous year. Israel exports several goods to the United States, including medicines and electronic components.

Numerous American tourists in Israel 

In 2021, the number of tourists from the United States in Israel amounted to 149,000 compared to around 200,000 in the previous year. This decrease stemmed from the coronavirus (COVID-19) restrictions that prevented international tourists from entering the country. Numerous American tourists visit Israel every year, including groups of Israeli and Jewish youth who reside in the United States and take, in well-known programs such as Taglit or Masa.

During the Holocaust, approximately six million Jews were killed. In France, the Jewish population had decreased by 140,000 individuals between 1939 and 1945. It then increased between the end of World War II and the 1970s, reaching 530,000 individuals in 1970. However, according to the source, the number of Jews in France has declined by more than 15 percent between that period and 2020, and is now estimated to be 442,000.

As early as 1319, allegations of well-poisoning had been levelled at leper communities in Europe, in an attempt to demonize and ostracize this group in society. In France and Spain in 1321, the "leper's plot" developed into a widespread conspiracy, claiming that leper communities were acting on the orders of the Jews or Spanish Moors, poisoning water supplies in an attempt to spread disease among Christians. Under royal decrees, many lepers were then tortured into confessing to these acts, and were subsequently burnt at the stake (although this was often carried out by vigilante mobs before it could be done by the courts). After the initial hysteria in 1321, the involvement of lepers was quickly dismissed, and a papal bull was introduced to grant protection to leper communities in France; this however did not dispel the myths surrounding the Jews' involvement in the conspiracy, and the issue emerged again a few decades later. Why the Jews were blamed When the bubonic plague made its way to Europe, many were eager to find a scapegoat on whom they could blame their misfortune. The "well-poisoning" accusations were quickly raised again against Jewish communities in France and Spain, and also across the German states. Historians point to several reasons why Jews were blamed for the Black Death; many Jews lived in separate communities and did not use the same common wells, and Jewish religious practices promote bathing and hand-washing; both of these factors meant that the plague spread differently and at a different rate among Jews than it did among the general population. Modern historians also point to the fact that Jews were often moneylenders, and their debtors often used the plague as an opportunity to expunge their debts; Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV also forfeited the property of Jews who were killed in the pogroms, giving further impetus to these mobs. Anti-Jewish pogroms The first reported pogroms took place in Toulon in 1348, before the violence then spread across the rest of Western Europe. Over the next three years, hundreds of Jewish communities were attacked and exterminated, with the majority taking place in the German states. A number of larger communities, such as those in Cologne and Mainz, were destroyed completely, resulting in the deaths and forced conversions of thousands of Jews. Pope Clement VI introduced two papal bulls in 1348, which granted the church's protection to Europe's Jews. He also urged the clergy and nobility to take measures that protected Jews in their local areas, although most sources show that authorities were apathetic or complicit in the actions of the mobs. There is even evidence that authorities orchestrated several of the pogroms, such as in Strasbourg, where authorities led the city's Jewish community to a newly-built house outside the city, but when they arrived, any Jews who refused to convert to Christianity were then burned alive inside the house. Legacy Many of the sources present different versions of events, with death tolls ranging from one hundred to several thousand in some cases, while some sources also claim that Jews set fire to their own homes rather than convert. It is now impossible to confirm the exact sequence of events, or the actual number of deaths resulting from these pogroms, however, the limited sources available do provide a brief foundation for the modern understanding of medieval anti-Semitism and the destruction inflicted upon the Jews during the plague. It is also important to note that these pogroms were not unique to the Black Death's outbreak, and there is evidence of numerous massacres of Jewish communities in the centuries that followed. The demographic impact of the massacres was that there was a mass exodus of Jews from west to Eastern Europe, to countries such as Poland (where they were actually welcomed by authorities). The consequences of this demographic shift would be most felt six centuries later, when millions of Jews across Eastern Europe were exterminated at the hands of the Nazi regime during the Holocaust.

Israel's population is aging steadily, with the median age projected to rise from 29 years in 2020 to 32 years by 2050. This demographic shift reflects global trends of increasing life expectancy and declining birth rates, though Israel maintained a relatively young population compared to many developed nations. The country's unique religious and cultural makeup contributed to regional variations in age distribution, presenting both opportunities and challenges for policymakers. Which region has the oldest population? As of 2023, over a quarter of Israelis were under the age of 14 years. The largest age group in the country being four-year olds and below. Interestingly, significant regional differences existed within the country when it came to age distribution and aging. While the median age in the Jerusalem district was below 24, Tel Aviv was the oldest region with an average age of over 34 years, highlighting significant demographic variations across different areas. How does religion influence demographics? Religious affiliation played a role in Israel's age structure and demographics. Muslims are the youngest religious group with a median age of 24 years, while Christians of Arab ethnicity are the oldest, at 35 years. Jews, the largest religious-ethnic group, had a median age of almost 32 years, but within the Jewish demographic, age and fertility varied greatly between people based on religiosity. These differences play a significant role in the country's population and future growth patterns.

In 2020, Mexico had a Jew population of 58,876 people. More than a third of that population lived in Mexico State by that time. Mexico City had almost 18,000 Jewish people in this same year.

Throughout the interwar period, Nazi leaders and propaganda repeatedly put forward the bogus claim that Jews owned up to 20 percent of all wealth in Germany, despite making up fewer than one percent of the population. At this time, Jews were used as a scapegoat for Germany's economic difficulties after the First World War and during the Great Depression, and the Nazis claimed that the Jews were lining their pockets at the expense of "Aryan" Germans. Unfortunately, there are no official figures for Jewish wealth in the 1930s, and emigration tax data only gives an insight into the finances of wealthier Jews. There are, however, a range of estimates from contemporary and more recent sources, which have been used to estimate the real share of German capital that was owned by Jews. Contemporary estimates At various points in the 1930s, the media, statistical office, and central bank all claimed that the combined wealth of German Jews was somewhere between two and 20 billion Reichsmarks (RM). While these three institutions were all state run under the Nazi regime, and despite their uncertainty, some of these estimates are still treated with consideration due to the credentials of the journalists, economists, and statisticians involved. Additionally, these figures were used with the purpose of identifying just how much money the state could take from the Jewish population, therefore it was of interest for the Nazi authorities to ascertain accurate figures, and not inflate estimates for propaganda purposes. Interestingly, the estimates from the Statistical office actually increased from 1933 to 1936, despite the fact that the state had already been seizing Jewish wealth and restricting Jewish business on a large scale since 1933; this has been attributed to the economic impact of the Great Depression. Modern estimates The estimates from Junz and Ritschl were published in 2002 and 2019 respectively, and used some of the contemporary estimates in their investigation, while taking many additional factors into account. These are now some of the most widely-cited estimates on this subject, with estimates of around 8-16 billion RM in 1933, five billion RM in 1936, and 4.4 billion RM in 1938. In Ritschl's 2019 paper, he then goes on to estimate the share of total German wealth owned by Jews; his results show that the Jewish share of private capital was slightly higher than the average, but was still very much in line with their population size.