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165,000 Holocaust Survivors Live in Israel

Approximately 165,000 Holocaust survivors were living in Israel at the end of 2021, the country’s Central Bureau of Statistics announced ahead of Yom Hashoah, the national Holocaust Remembrance Day.

The annual memorial day, which honors the 6 million Jews who died at the hands of Nazi Germany and its collaborators during World War II, begins on Wednesday at sunset and continues until Thursday night.

The bureau noted that in 1939, on the eve of the war, the global Jewish population was 16.6 million. By the end of the war, which saw the murder of more than one in three Jews worldwide, the Jewish population had dropped to 11.5 million. At the end of 2020, the world Jewish population was 15.2 million; it still had not recovered to its pre-Holocaust numbers.

Of these, 6.9 million – 45% – lived in Israel, 6 million in the United States, 445,000 in France, 393,000 in Canada, and 292,000 in the United Kingdom. These five countries together account for more than 92% of the global Jewish population.

Among Israel’s 6.9 million Jews at the end of 2020, 5.4 million (78%) were native-born, 1 million were born in Europe or the Americas, 284,400 in Africa, and 153,700 in Asia outside of Israel.