Today is Yom HaShoah: Holocaust Memorial Day
The era of the Holocaust began in 1933 when Adolph Hitler and his Nazi party came to power. Over the ensuing years, Jews were violently persecuted. The “Final Solution” inaugurated the systematic and organized murder of Europe’s Jews, beginning in 1941 and ending in 1945. By the end of the war, six million of our people were murdered by the Nazis, their allies and collaborators.
Before the war in 1939, Europe’s Jewish population was nearly ten million. Sixty percent of the Jews of Europe died. In Poland, with the largest pre-war Jewish population of approximately 3.3 million, some 3 million, or 90% of Jews, were murdered. Russia, the second largest Jewish population of just over 3 million, lost over a million Jews. Other smaller Jewish communities such as Greece (77,00) and Lithuania (168,000) witnessed the murder of some 90% of their Jewish population.
After the war, a third of world Jewry had been decimated. While it is not possible to fully calculate the impact on both the individual Jew, his or her family, and the future of world Jewry, it is worth contemplating: Had the Holocaust not occurred, what would our population look like today?
In tomorrow’s Daily Kavanah email, I will share some chilling calculations.
— Rabbi David Woznica
*The numbers are based on the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and Yad Vashem.