Israel’s population reaches 10 million, but its Jewish demography is changing – and with it, so is the Diaspora’s

Israeli population has changed over the years. It continues to do so.

The cultural make-up of the Israeli Jewish population has changed over the years, primarily due to immigration, which, since March 2022, is coming particularly from Russia (though not so much from Ukraine). But in recent years, Israel’s growth has happened primarily due to robust natural increase.

However, the October 7th massacre and the kidnapping of over 250 hostages to Gaza may represent a tragic rupture of the growing population pattern. The subsequent war on several fronts, with hundreds of military and civilian losses, the dislocation of hundreds of thousands in the north and in the south, and the prolonged enrolment of vast numbers of young adults in the reserve army, has caused an unprecedented socioeconomic and existential crisis.

In 2024, based on the assessment of those who left the country in 2023 and did not return one year later, Israel had an utterly unusual negative international migration balance. Such a negative balance has only previously occurred very occasionally, a few times in the 1980s, once in the 1950s, and once in the 1920s. However, when it did, the main reason for leaving Israel was an underlying economic crisis. In the present case, about 80,000 Israelis left the country, about 30,000 returned from previous long-term stays abroad, and about 30,000 were new immigrants.

One possible way to read these data is that the eventual total annual deficit of about 18,000 in 2024 can be attributed mainly to the rapid departures of 14,000 people following the horrors of October 2023. Yet, in many respects, given the challenging circumstances, we might have expected the negative migration balance in Israel to have been significantly larger. In reality, Israelis showed a high degree of resilience – the data also suggest that many returned to the country immediately after the attacks. Whether the migration balance will return to positive depends on the outcome of military operations and Israel’s capacity to return to fast economic growth.

Emigration from Israel helps sustain Jewish communities worldwide

The symmetric view of emigration from Israel is that those leaving Israel help sustain some of the Jewish communities around the world that are declining due to ageing and low fertility rates. JPR’s report on Jews in the Netherlands reveals that the Dutch Jewish population is growing mainly due to the immigration of young Israelis, to the point now where most of the Jewish children living in the Netherlands were either born in Israel, or to an Israeli parent.

There is a strong correlation between a nation’s socioeconomic development level and the percentage of Jews among its citizens, to the point that the Index of Human Development can nearly predict the Jewish presence in a specific country. Huge transfers of Jews from Eastern Europe and Muslim countries to the more economically prosperous and developed countries of North America, Western Europe and Israel have completely transformed the global map of Jewish life over the past Century. Today, more than 85% of Jews worldwide concentrate in only two countries: the US and Israel. But Jewish dispersion is not over, as over 100 countries and territories comprise 100 Jews or more. The global Jewish population is still not as large as it was in 1939, but within the next decade, the worldwide numbers might finally reach the level they were before the Holocaust.

Religious diversity characterises Israel and, to some extent, other Jewish communities as well, with the proportion of haredim increasing everywhere thanks to their high fertility levels. This is especially true in Israel, where the state supports the many adult men who do not serve in the army, do not participate in the labour force, and devote their time to studying more intensively than elsewhere.

The prospective differential growth of the different religious sectors in Israel could potentially create an entirely different social structure by the mid-21st Century, with lower enrolment in the military, more diffused poverty, and a plurality of haredim in Israel’s educational system. Unless the pendulum of self-segregation and modernisation rejection reverses its course, in which case substantial human resources would then become available to the general development of Israeli society and Jewish communities throughout the world.