Israel to pass U.S. as biggest Jewish community

By Matthew Tostevin

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Israel will by next year become home
to the largest Jewish community in the world for the first
time, surpassing the Jewish population in the United States, a
think tank said on Tuesday.

Not for nearly 2,000 years has the Holy Land been home to
the globe’s biggest Jewish community.

The report from the Jewish People Policy Planning Institute
said the Jewish population of Israel was about 5.24 million and
of the United States some 5.28 million, but the balance was
shifting quickly.

“The Jewish community in Israel is the most vibrant in the
world,” said Avinoam Bar-Yosef, director general of the
Jerusalem-based JPPPI. “In the U.S., the community has been
stagnant by numbers for many years,” he told Reuters.

Although immigration to Israel has dropped, especially
since a Palestinian uprising blew up in 2000, the birth rate of
Israeli Jews is much higher than abroad — each woman has an
average of up to 2.7 children.

There are also fewer marriages between Jews and non-Jews in
Israel than in communities abroad.

The last time this region was home to the world’s largest
Jewish community was in the 1st century, when the Romans put
down a rebellion and much of the Jewish population scattered.

The report from the pro-immigration thinktank predicted the
Jewish population of Israel would grow to 6.23 million by 2020
from 650,000 when the state was founded in 1948. The world’s
Jewish population would grow to 13.5 million from 13 million.

SHIFTING DEMOGRAPHIC BALANCE

Demography is high on the agenda in Israel, where
policymakers seek to preserve a Jewish majority in the Zionist
homeland.

Arabs, most of them Muslims, make up more than one fifth of
Israel’s population of 6.9 million. But a further 3.8 million
Palestinians live in the West Bank and Gaza Strip — occupied
by Israel since the 1967 Middle East war.

“Over the whole territory between the Mediterranean Sea and
the Jordan River there is a marked trend toward the
consolidation of an Arab majority by 2010,” the report said.

It put the fertility rate of Israeli Arabs at about 4.6
children per woman, much higher than for Jews, and said Israel
needed 60,000 to 100,000 new immigrants a year to ensure the
Jewish majority did not shrink.

Immigration fell from around 70,000-80,000 a year in the
1990s — when large numbers were still leaving the former
Soviet Union — to just 23,000 in 2003, the report said.

One argument put forward by backers of Prime Minister Ariel
Sharon’s plan for giving up the Gaza Strip later this year is
that it will remove nearly 1.4 million Palestinians from the
demographic equation. Some 8,500 settlers live in the
territory.

The question of who counts as a Jew can pose a problem for
surveys. The JPPPI used the religious-based definition of those
with a Jewish mother. For immigration to Israel, the
requirement is at least one Jewish grandparent.