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OCTOBER 29, 2020 | The Jewish Home
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Europe’s Jewish Numbers Fall 90%
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A new study has found that Europe’s Jewish population is vanishing, with the total number of Jews on the continent falling to a low not seen for almost 1,000 years. The findings are the result of a study commissioned by the Institute for Jewish Policy Research (JPR), which hired demographers Prof. Sergio Della Pergola and Dr. Daniel Staetsky to look at how many Jews remain in Europe. To reach their conclusions, the two academics studied population records and membership data in Jewish communities in Europe, the United Kingdom, Turkey, and Russia. According to the study, only 1.3 million Jews currently reside in Europe, a 60% drop over the past 50 years and the lowest number in 1,000 years. While 88% of world Jewry lived in Europe by the end of the 19th century, today the number has dwindled to 9% in what the demographers say is an “unprecedented” decrease. The decline is particularly dramatic in France, which long was home to Europe’s largest Jewish population. Rising anti-Semitism and terrorism in the country have led 51,000 Jews to immigrate to Israel since 2000, leading France to be overtaken by Canada as home to the world’s second-largest Diaspora population. “Jews in Europe had grown to constitute 83 percent of world Jewry in 1900. They now account for merely 9 percent of the total number of Jews worldwide,” wrote the authors. “The proportion of Jews residing in Europe [in 2020] is about the same as it was at the time of the first Jewish global population account conducted
by Benjamin of Tudela, a Jewish medieval traveler, in 1170.” The researchers listed a number of factors to explain the drop-off, including the six million Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust. Another reason cited is the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, which resulted in 1.5 million Jews immigrating to Israel and the United States. Adding to the continent’s demographic downfall is the soaring intermarriage rate in western European countries such as Britain and the UK. With assimilation in the aforementioned states now above 50%, hundreds of thousands of Jews have been lost in what Jewish leaders call a “silent” or “second Holocaust.”
Samsung Group Titan Dies
Lee Kun-hee, the South Korean industrialist who headed Samsung Group, died this week at the age of 78. Born under the Japanese occupation of Korea, Lee inherited Samsung after his father’s death in 1987. Samsung was then a small company founded by the older Lee in order to export dried fish and fruit. Over the next three decades, Lee transformed Samsung from a manufacturer of low-quality goods to one of the world’s biggest tech firms. Lee was known for his radical approach in transforming Samsung, famously telling employees, “Let’s change everything except our wives and kids.” After deciding that the company’s mobile phone offerings were inferior in 1993, he ordered Samsung to burn its entire stock, setting 150,000 handsets ablaze. Lee would also order products made by leading competitors and put them on display at Samsung headquarters, telling subordinates that he “wanted our employees to see how other companies think.” Lee’s unorthodox methods paid off; by 2014, Samsung had overtaken Apple to become the biggest maker of smartphones and computer chips. Lee’s business success made Lee South Korea’s richest man, with a net worth of $21 billion. However, he of-
