A Jerusalem-based research center announced recently the world Jewish community is about the same size now it was before the Holocaust. Estonia, however, only has about half the number of Jews it did in 1939. There are about 2,000 Jews living there currently. Before the war the number was 4,500. The director of Estonia’s Jewish museum says he has no explanation, that Estonia is a good place to live and there is no sense of open hostility there.

According to the announcement there are currently 14.2 million Jews in the world. That number jumps to 16.5 million if you include people with just one Jewish parent. Most live in Israel and America, 6.1 and 5.7 million respectively. In the 1930s the Soviet Union was home to more than 4 million Jews, but not just 300,000 live in the same territory. In 1941 before Germany invaded Estonia the Jewish population had dropped because a majority sought refuge in the Soviet Union. The thousand or so who decided to stay on and brave it out were all murdered by Nazi forces. By December, 1941, there was not a single Jew left in Estonia, and the Nazis proudly hailed the conquered territory as the first judenrein–“Jew-free”–area in the Reich.

After World War II some Jews trickled back into Estonia. The high-water mark came in 1959 when about 5,500 Jews lived there. Since then the population has been in decline, with migration to Israel, USA and Europe following the fall of the USSR, although at the current time the population figure is relatively static.

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