Jewish migration today: What it may mean for Europe

In this report:

We look into Jewish migration from 15 European countries - representing 94% of Jews living in Europe -  comparing data from recent years to previous periods over the last century, and focusing on the signal that the current levels of Jewish migration from Europe send about the political realities perceived and experienced by European Jews.

Some of the key findings in this report:

• Peak periods of Jewish migration in the past century – from Germany in the 1930s, North Africa in the 1960s and the Former Soviet Union in the 1990s, saw 50%-75% of national Jewish populations migrate in no more than a decade;
• No European Jewish population has shown signs of migration at anywhere near that level for several decades, although recent patterns from Russia and Ukraine point to that possibility over the coming years;
• France, Belgium, Italy and Spain saw strong surges in Jewish emigration in the first half of the 2010s, which declined subsequently, but not as far as pre-surge levels;
• However, the higher levels of migration measured in these countries during the last decade have not reached the critical values indicating any serious Jewish ‘exodus’ from them;
• For Russian and Ukrainian Jews, 2022 was a watershed year: if migration from these countries continues for seven years at the levels seen in 2022 and early 2023, 80%-90% of the 2021 Jewish population of Ukraine and 50%-60% of the 2021 Jewish population of Russia will have emigrated;
• Jewish emigration from the UK, Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands, Austria and Denmark has mainly been stable or declining since the mid-1980s;
• In Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands, there has been some decline in Jewish migration over the observed period, with migration eventually settling at a new, lower level.