This year, as Yom HaShoah — the Day of Holocaust Remembrance — is observed from Monday evening through Tuesday, new government data paints a picture that is at once remarkable and sobering: Israel is home to 111,000 Holocaust survivors, most of them women in their 80s and 90s, the last living witnesses to history’s most systematic slaughter. And eighty years after the liberation of the camps, the Jewish people have still not replaced what was taken from them.
But the day commemorating the Holocaust is a wake-up call. The world’s Jewish population today — 15.8 million — remains smaller than it was on the eve of the war.
A Population That Has Not Recovered
Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) released its annual figures on Sunday, ahead of Yom HaShoah, revealing that the global Jewish population stood at 15.8 million at the start of 2025. In 1939, on the eve of the Nazi genocide, there were 16.6 million Jews in the world. The arithmetic is brutal: eight decades after the end of World War II, the Jewish people are still 800,000 souls behind where they stood before Hitler.
That number represents generations of children never born, communities never rebuilt, yeshivas never reopened. The Holocaust did not merely kill six million individuals — it severed the chain of transmission for thousands of communities across Europe. The CBS data make clear that the demographic wound has not healed.
In 1939, only 449,000 Jews — roughly 3% of the world’s Jewish population — lived in the Land of Israel. Today, 7.2 million Jews live in the Jewish state, comprising 45% of the global Jewish total. The founding of Israel did not just provide a refuge. It shifted the center of Jewish civilization.
The United States is home to 6.3 million Jews, approximately 40% of the global total. Together, Israel and the United States account for roughly 85% of world Jewry. Outside these two countries, Jewish populations are comparatively small: France has 436,000, Canada 407,000, the United Kingdom 315,000, Argentina 168,000, Germany 126,000, Russia 120,000, and Australia 117,000.
The trends within those communities are telling. France’s Jewish population has continued its slight decline, from 440,000 two years ago to 436,000 today. Russia has seen a sharper drop — from 132,000 to 120,000, nearly 10% in two years — a decline driven in part by emigration, much of it to Israel. Argentina has also fallen, from 171,000 to 168,000. Canada is a notable exception, rising from 398,000 to 407,000, even as antisemitic incidents there have surged.
The 111,000
According to CBS data compiled from the Authority for the Rights of Holocaust Survivors, 111,000 Holocaust survivors and victims of antisemitic persecution during the Holocaust era are currently living in Israel. That number is down from 123,000 just one year ago, in January 2025. Every week, more of these men and women — the last people alive who saw the cattle cars, the selections, the smoke — are dying.
Every single survivor is at least 80 years old. Twenty-eight percent are over 90. Women make up 63% of the survivors. Nearly half — 49.3% — are widowed. There are currently 9,300 households in Israel where both husband and wife are Holocaust survivors.
Their origins reflect the full geographic breadth of Nazi persecution and wartime antisemitism. Around 60% of survivors living in Israel were born in Europe. The largest group — 36% — came from the former Soviet Union, 84% of whom arrived during the mass aliyah wave of the 1990s. Romanians and Poles follow in significant numbers. But the data also includes Jews from North Africa and the Middle East — victims of the 1941 Farhud, the brutal pogrom against Iraq’s Jewish community, as well as Jews who suffered under Nazi-occupied or Nazi-aligned regimes in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya. These communities are often omitted from popular Holocaust consciousness, and their inclusion in Israel’s official figures is a corrective to that erasure.
The wave of aliyah — immigration to Israel — among survivors tracks the major chapters of Israeli history. A small but heroic 6% arrived before 1948, during the British Mandate period, many of them illegally on boats that were intercepted and turned away. After independence, 30.2% arrived in the great immigration wave of 1948–1951. Another 30.2% came between 1952 and 1989. And 33.6% have arrived since the 1990s, overwhelmingly from the former Soviet Union after its collapse.
Today, 95% of survivors live in urban communities. The city with the highest concentration is Haifa, with 7,500 survivors, followed by Jerusalem with 7,100, Tel Aviv with 6,000, Ashdod with 5,500, Netanya with 5,400, Petah Tikva with 4,700, and Beersheba and Rishon Lezion each with approximately 4,600.
A Closing Window
In April 2025, the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany estimated that there were 211,300 Holocaust survivors still alive worldwide — but that almost half would be gone by 2032. The Israeli figures, counting only those in Israel, confirm the pace of loss. What took the Nazis years to destroy by force, time is now completing quietly, in hospitals and nursing homes across the Jewish state.
Holocaust educators and historians have long warned that the death of the last eyewitnesses will mark a fundamental shift in how the genocide is remembered and taught. A survivor standing before a classroom of teenagers and saying “I was there” carries a weight no documentary, no textbook, and no museum exhibit can replicate. That window is closing.
The two-minute siren that will pierce the Israeli sky on Tuesday morning will be heard by 111,000 people who don’t need to be told why they are stopping. They already know. The question for the rest of us — for Israel, for the Jewish world, for anyone who claims to stand with the Jewish people — is whether the memory will hold when they are gone.
