Looking ahead to 2025, our research priorities are clear

The importance of monitoring Jewish migration and other demographic trends.

At the same time, we know well that the political turmoil we see around us can alter Jewish life in numerous ways. Under volatile economic or security circumstances, people are more likely than usual to migrate, so it would not be wholly unexpected to see an increase in the flow of Diaspora Jews to Israel and, indeed, of Israeli Jews into the Diaspora.

Monitoring these types of trends is critical from a community perspective: even small changes can have a significant impact in terms of demand for school places, elderly care services, housing and mental health needs – all issues that, if service providers fail to plan well, can have serious real-life consequences. With this in mind, we’ll be publishing groundbreaking new data on migration in 2025, under the auspices of our European Jewish Demography Unit. That topic will also be a key feature in our major sociodemographic study of Jews in the Netherlands that we will be launching in Amsterdam in the new year – a key contribution to that community at a time when it is feeling rattled and vulnerable following recent events there.

Closer to home, we hope to make the UK a key focus of our demographic work in 2025. It is not always easy to do so – it takes research expertise to gather, analyse, understand and use demographic data, and that, of course, costs money. The UK community has not invested well in fundamental Jewish demographic work in recent years: the Board of Deputies used to have a well-funded Community Research Unit that gathered Jewish community statistics, but that no longer exists. Whilst the team at JPR has done everything possible to plug the gap, publishing significant reports in this area on the 2021 UK Census, intermarriage, and haredi population trends, we can only go so far without sufficient investment.

Nevertheless, as we move into 2025, we are making progress on several fronts – particularly in the areas of school enrolment, natural change (the balance between births and deaths), and interpreting more data on Jews from the 2021/22 Census (which, for several reasons, is far more complex than in previous censuses). Subject to gaining the support we need, these will be important parts of our 2025 programme. None of these data are simply ‘nice to haves’; no Jewish community can function or plan effectively without an up-to-date and evolving understanding of its demographic characteristics and prospects, so this type of work is critical to the effective functioning of every communal organisation.

The only way to know what Jews think, feel and do, is to ask them

Demographic data also play an essential role in conducting social surveys. JPR’s unique UK Jewish Population Research Panel is beginning to achieve its potential in this regard; we have conducted six major surveys of British Jews since 2020 and are currently preparing for a seventh in the summer of 2025. Beyond the main themes of these surveys, the Panel has also allowed us to run modules of questions for community charities – most recently for Jewish Care (on elderly care preferences), Maccabi (on antisemitism in sport), and Jami (on mental health) – thereby enabling them to gain access to high-quality, accurate data at a fraction of the price it would cost them to run their own national surveys.

Moreover, we continually build our surveys with an eye on maximising the value of their data over time. Right now, we are using data gathered in 2022 to support a project for the Jewish Leadership Council about the impact of Jewish education on Jewish identity, and in 2025, we will be drawing on data going back as far as 1996 to help identify trends in British Jews’ relationship with Israel. We regard the JPR Research Panel as a fundamental infrastructural project for the UK Jewish community, and we will be aiming to develop it further in 2025 to make it even more valuable to organisations working to support Jewish life.

All of that is just a taster of what is to come. Most importantly, as we move into 2025, JPR will continue to be the only organisation thinking strategically about the research needs of the entire Jewish community over time, both in the UK and across Europe. Life for Jews is changing and will continue to do so; our goal is always to ensure that community organisations have the best quality data they need at the most cost-efficient price to help them plan for our shared future. At a time when Jewish life feels more fragile and uncertain than it has done for some time, our work is becoming more critical than ever.