Posted on 04/20/17
| News Source: Arutz Sheva
The number of Jews in the world has increased to more than 14.4 million according to data published by the Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) ahead of Holocaust Remembrance day.
According to the CBS figures, there are presently 14.411 million Jews worldwide, nearly half of which live in the State of Israel. Nearly 90% of Jews live in either Israel, the United States, or Canada.
The largest Jewish community in the world, according to the CBS, is Israel, with 6,335,000 people, or about 44% of the total global Jewish population.
About 39.5% of Jews live in the US – roughly 5,700,000, while another 388,000 – or 2.7% of the global total – live in Canada.
Nearly half a million Jews live in France (460,000), or about 3.2% of the total Jewish population.
Other large Jewish populations include 290,000 in the UK (2.0% of the global total), 181,000 in Argentina (1.3%), 180,000 in Russia (1.2%), 117,000 in Germany (0.8%) and 113,000 in Australia (0.8%).
While the number of Jews living in the Diaspora continues to decrease, the number of Jews in Israel has grown significantly, offsetting the decline abroad.
In 2010 there were less than 13.5 million Jews worldwide, and just under 12.9 million in 2000.
Despite the increases, however, the total Jewish population has yet to recover from the murder of roughly six million Jews during the Holocaust.
On the eve of World War II, there were more than 16.7 million Jews worldwide. That number declined to just under 11 million by the end of the war in 1945.
When the State of Israel was founded in 1948, the Jewish population had increased to 11.5 million, of which just over 600,000 lived in Israel.
The Jewish population increased significantly in the years immediately following the war, but levelled off after the late 1950s. After topping 12 million in 1960, growth rates slowed, with the global Jewish population remaining under 13 million for more than 40 years.