Jews of Different Types and Experiences and Languages Found in Each European Country

 Nadene Goldfoot                                                                                  

Pogroms drove Jews out of Europe and to Palestine or the USA.

My Bubba from Lazdijai, Lithuania only spoke Yiddish, the language most all Jews spoke in Europe, Yiddish is a combination of Hebrew and medieval German. The language is written in Hebrew, but takes most of the words from German, about 75% comes from German. The two languages are geographically and culturally distinct seeing as much of the grammar in Yiddish has been derived from many Slavic languages. She never did learn English or Lithuanian. Bubba could tell by one's Yiddish as to where they came from in Europe.   She immigrated to the USA around 1900.  Black hair, round face, about 4'8, short from being in pogrom where her legs were broken, wound up in Council, Idaho and found our grandfather, Nathan Abraham Goldfoot which had been Goldfus before he changed it in England after leaving Lithuania.  Many in our family were very short-a sign of lack of food in Europe.  Their children in the USA were very tall.  

Gassed in Europe.  All life changed in 1933.  Germany had decided to blame Jews for all their failings.  The 2nd world-wide extinction program began with Germany and Hitler.  Once before, a man named Haman had tried to do the same thing, but was stopped by Queen Esther.    On the king's orders, Haman was hanged from the 50-cubit-high gallows that had originally been built by Haman himself, on the advice of his wife Zeresh, in order to hang Mordecai. The bodies of Haman's ten sons were also hanged, after they died in battle against the Jews.

Jews moving their belongings into the  Lodz Ghetto, Poland, 1940. (RG 241, Nachman Zonabend, Records) during WWII, where they might starve to death.  

In 1941 and 1942, almost 40,000 Jews were deported to the Lodz ghetto: 20,000 from Germany, Austria, the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, and Luxembourg, and almost 20,000 from the smaller provincial towns in the Warthegau. View This Term in the Glossary About 5,000 Roma (Gypsies) from Austria, primarily from the Burgenland province, were deported to the ghetto. They were confined in a segregated block of buildings. In total, approximately 210,000 people were forced to live in the Lodz ghetto.

 The Germans isolated the ghetto from the rest of Lodz with barbed-wire fencing. German Order Policemen guarded the ghetto perimeter. Internal order in the ghetto was largely the responsibility of Jewish ghetto police. The ghetto area was divided into three parts by the intersection of two major roads. The intersection itself lay outside the ghetto. Bridges constructed over the two thoroughfares connected the three segments of the ghetto. Streetcars for the non-Jewish population of Lodz traversed the ghetto but were not permitted to stop within it.  The whole ghetto was designed, actually, to starve the people out.  Living conditions in the ghetto were horrendous. Most of the quarter had neither running water nor a sewer system. Hard labor, overcrowding, and starvation were the dominant features of life. The overwhelming majority of ghetto residents worked in German factories and received only meager food rations. More than 20 percent of the ghetto's population died as a direct result of the harsh living conditions.  —Leo Schneiderman

By 1975 the total population of the 9 current members of the European Economic Community was about 260 million, and living among them were about 1,200,000 Jews;  or less than 1/2 of a %.  

The current population of Europe is 748,835,153 as of Tuesday, February 21, 2023, based on the latest United Nations estimates. Europe population is equivalent to 9.78% of the total world population.

Europe's Jewish population has dropped 60% in last 50 years.  There are still more than a million Jews living in Europe, according to 2010 Pew Research Center estimates.

Judaism is one of the oldest and most influential religions in the world, with more than 14.7 million practitioners worldwide as of 2019. If counting the "enlarged" Jewish population—which is to say, if including individuals with partial Jewish heritage—the number of Jews in the world swells to 20 million.They must be counting the 6 million in Israel with this number.  

 But that number has dropped significantly over the last several decades – most dramatically in Eastern Europe and the countries that make up the former Soviet Union, according to historical research by Sergio DellaPergola of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Each Jewish community is a world in itself, with its own successes and and personality, food specialties and educational background. 

British Jewry escaped Nazi occupation, while 

Jews in France suffered all its horrors. 

 The Anglo-Jewish community has remained more or less stationary in its numerical population.  

       In France, things have only gotten worse.  French Jews were fleeing the country.  There's too much anti-Semitism.  

The Jewish poulation grew from 120,00 in 1945 to 600,000 by 1975.  Since then, many French have made aliyah to Israel because of anti-Semitism.  France had an influx of newcomers from Eastern Europe, North Africa and Arab countries. 450,000 Jews are still in France.  

       In Britain, the Jewry is largely of Ashkenazi origin, while a large part of the Jewish population in France, over 50% are Sephardim.  292,000 Jews live in UK.  

Before WWII in 1933, There were over 525,000 Jews in Germany.  By 1975, only 30,000 in West Germany and fewer than 2,000 in East Germany--and only a fraction were from pre-war Germany.  The rest  were survivors of the gas chambers and concentration camps who remained in the country, or new-comers from a variety of places.  

In 1975, there were about 35,000 in Italy.  They lived in Rome and in Milan, with Rome having 13,000 with origins going back to native Italian-Jewish stock.  Milan, with 10,000 Jews, an industrial and commercial city, attracted Jews from Germany, Yugoslavia, Hungary and Rumania and the Arab countries.  Jews were also living in small towns of Turin, Florence, Venice, Leghorn and Genoa.  

Belgium, who has a huge Arab community that police do not enter, happens to be a French-speaking city.  Before WWII, 80,000 Jews lived there.   By 1945, 27,000 had been deported to Auschwitz.  By 1975, about 40,000 lived there.  The Belgian Jewish community currently numbers around 30,000 (out of a total population of 11 million), most of whom live in Brussels or Antwerp, the country’s two largest cities. While most Jews in the mainly French-speaking capital of Brussels are secular, the Dutch-speaking port city of Antwerp has one of the largest ultra-Orthodox Jewish populations in Europe.

                                                

Top 10 Countries with the Largest Jewish populations (2019):

1. Israel - 6,894,000 (2021 data)
2. United States - 5,700,000 (Possibly 6.7 million. Sources differ.)
3. France - 450,000
4. Canada - 392,000
5. United Kingdom - 292,000
6. Argentina - 180,000
7. Russia - 165,000
8. Germany - 118,000 (tie)
9. Australia - 118,000 (tie)
10. Brazil - 92,600

European Jews in Israel: in 2015 and 2008, then the % of 2015, 2008 A lot more came from Poland than from Britain as Poland has always had a large Jewish population.  There were more from Romania and other European countries.  Romanians were among the 1st people in Israel in the 1880s.  When I lived in Israel, I was there from 1980 to the end of 85, and there had been a large influx of Russian Jews.  We were in Hebrew classes together.  The Russians knew how to study a language and we from the USA really didn't.  The Russians were going to be English teachers.  Poor Israel.  They had very few Jews from the States like my husband and I, both teachers from Oregon.

In the USA, Jews are about 2% of the population.  More live on the East Coast.  California has a big population.    2015----2008

From Europe by own or paternal country of origin:		1,648,000	1,662,800		26.26%	30.1%
Russia and former USSR		891,700	923,600		14.21%	16.83%
Romania		199,400	213,100		3.18%	3.86%
Poland		185,400	198,500		2.95%	3.59%
France		87,500	63,200		1.39%	1.14%
Germany and Austria		70,800	49,700		1.13%	0.9%
Hungary, Czech Republic, and Slovakia		59,800	64,900		0.95%	1.17%
United Kingdom		46,000	39,800		0.73%	0.72%
Bulgaria and Greece		45,500	48,900		0.72%	0.89%
Other European		61,900	61,100		0.99%	1.11%

Resource:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Israel

Book:  Letters From Israel, by me-Nadene Goldfoot-all true. 

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/jewish-population-by-country 

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/02/09/europes-jewish-population/

https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/europe-population/#:~:text=Europe%20Population%20(LIVE)&text=The%20current%20population%20of%20Europe,of%20the%20total%20world%20population.