Study: Nearly a million Israelis live abroad, changing the face of European Jewry
While most live in the US, Europe is now home to some 30% of Israelis abroad, bringing ‘significant transformation’ to local communities, Institute for Jewish Policy Research says
Zev Stub is the Times of Israel's Diaspora Affairs correspondent.
Nearly a million Israeli citizens and their children live outside Israel, according to a new report by the London-based Institute for Jewish Policy Research.
While most Israeli expats live in the United States, many Israelis have chosen to move to Europe over the past 25 years, with profound impacts on local Jewish communities there, noted Daniel Staetsky, the report’s author and senior research fellow and director of JPR’s European Demography Unit.
The data suggests that “the Jewish Diaspora is undergoing a significant transformation,” Staetsky wrote in the report. “Cultural transformation… is likely to follow on the back of the demographic change.”
The report, which claims to provide the most detailed insight on Israeli expats to date, is based on information gathered between 2021 and 2023, and does not reflect population changes taking place after Hamas launched its war with Israel on October 7, 2023, Staetsky told The Times of Israel.
More than 82,000 Israelis left the country in 2024, according to data from the Central Bureau of Statistics. It is still too early to assess their long-term impact on the data, Staetsky noted.
About 630,000 Israelis lived outside Israel during the period surveyed, equivalent to about 6% of Israel’s population. That includes 328,000 who were born in Israel and another 302,000 who were born elsewhere but acquired Israeli citizenship and lived in Israel during their lives.
When their children who aren’t Israeli nationals are added to the calculation, there are some 955,000 “Israel-connected” people outside of Israel, the report said. About 80% of these totals are Jewish, with the remainder being Muslims and other groups.
“We can see that if all these people would have stayed in Israel, the country would have about another million people, maybe 11 million instead of the current 10 million,” Staetsky told The Times of Israel. “I’m not sure that difference is so dramatic for Israel in the big picture, but others may disagree.”
The largest Israeli populations abroad are based in the US, where about half of them reside, followed by Canada, Germany and the UK. About three-quarters of all Israelis outside of Israel live in English-speaking countries, the report noted.
However, more Israelis than previously expected have been moving to Europe in recent years, due to a number of factors that include strengthening economies, geographic proximity to Israel, and several countries that grant citizenship to Israelis based on their ancestry, the report said.
The continent (including the UK) is now home to nearly 30% of Israelis abroad, an outsized proportion considering that only 16% of all Diaspora Jews live in the continent.
“If you look at Europe as a whole, it is clear that changing migration patterns affect the culture and character of native populations,” Staetsky said. “This is natural. It’s the same thing for Jewish communities and Israelis. They are coming to a new country with a different mentality, and it impacts the communities they join.”
Germany has the largest population of Israel-born people in Europe, followed by the UK, the report noted. Together, these two countries have nearly 50% of Israelis living in Europe.
Meanwhile, many small Jewish communities have seen significant influxes of Israelis. During the past decade, Israeli-born populations have skyrocketed in the Baltic countries (135%), Ireland (95%), Bulgaria (78%), Czechia (74%), Spain (39%), The Netherlands (36%), Germany (34%) and the UK (27%), the report noted.
Israel-born Jews now make up nearly half of the Jewish population in Norway, 41% in Finland, and over 20% of the Jewish communities in Bulgaria, Ireland, Spain and Denmark.
These are communities that had previously been expected to gradually decline, due to low birthrates, aging populations and wide scales of emigration, Staetsky noted. However, “Israelis joining these communities are helping to maintain their numeric levels and even increase them.”
In the Netherlands, for example, a trickle of 200 Israelis emigrating annually serves to offset population decline in the Jewish community of 35,000, JPR noted in a separate report in January.
In contrast, Israeli-born Jews make up only about 3% of the population of 7.5 million Jews in the United States.
Jews in Europe must adapt to these changing trends, not least by increasing options for Jewish schooling in communities where young Israeli families are joining, the report said.
“The thesis of a ‘vanishing Diaspora,’ even if it still holds good in its essentials at a European level, needs to be qualified at a country-specific level,” the report concluded. “Diving deeper into the demography of Israelis abroad, and in Europe in particular, holds a key to that.”
Staetsky offered a minor example of changing trends in Europe from his local kosher supermarket: “In London 15 years ago, you could only find Ashkenazi food, and you couldn’t find anyone who sold kubbeh. Now, all the stores have it.”
The Times of Israel Community.