Israel to pass U.S. as biggest Jewish community

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By Matthew Tostevin

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israel will by next year become home to the largest Jewish community in the world for the first time, surpassing the Jewish population in the United States, a think tank said on Tuesday.

Not for nearly 2,000 years has the Holy Land been home to the globe's biggest Jewish community.

The report from the Jewish People Policy Planning Institute said the Jewish population of Israel was about 5.24 million and of the United States some 5.28 million, but the balance was shifting quickly.

"The Jewish community in Israel is the most vibrant in the world," said Avinoam Bar-Yosef, director general of the Jerusalem-based JPPPI. "In the U.S., the community has been stagnant by numbers for many years," he told Reuters.

Although immigration to Israel has dropped, especially since a Palestinian uprising blew up in 2000, the birth rate of Israeli Jews is much higher than abroad -- each woman has an average of up to 2.7 children.

There are also fewer marriages between Jews and non-Jews in Israel than in communities abroad.

The last time this region was home to the world's largest Jewish community was in the 1st century, when the Romans put down a rebellion and much of the Jewish population scattered.

The report from the pro-immigration thinktank predicted the Jewish population of Israel would grow to 6.23 million by 2020 from 650,000 when the state was founded in 1948. The world's Jewish population would grow to 13.5 million from 13 million.

SHIFTING DEMOGRAPHIC BALANCE

Demography is high on the agenda in Israel, where policymakers seek to preserve a Jewish majority in the Zionist homeland.

Arabs, most of them Muslims, make up more than one fifth of Israel's population of 6.9 million. But a further 3.8 million Palestinians live in the West Bank and Gaza Strip -- occupied by Israel since the 1967 Middle East war.

"Over the whole territory between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River there is a marked trend toward the consolidation of an Arab majority by 2010," the report said.

It put the fertility rate of Israeli Arabs at about 4.6 children per woman, much higher than for Jews, and said Israel needed 60,000 to 100,000 new immigrants a year to ensure the Jewish majority did not shrink.

Immigration fell from around 70,000-80,000 a year in the 1990s -- when large numbers were still leaving the former Soviet Union -- to just 23,000 in 2003, the report said.

One argument put forward by backers of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's plan for giving up the Gaza Strip later this year is that it will remove nearly 1.4 million Palestinians from the demographic equation. Some 8,500 settlers live in the territory.

The question of who counts as a Jew can pose a problem for surveys. The JPPPI used the religious-based definition of those with a Jewish mother. For immigration to Israel, the requirement is at least one Jewish grandparent.

[Guest Zayit]

Just another sign that we may be welcomed home soon!

[apothanein kerdos]

One Jewish grandparent?

I could immigrate, I have two

Hopefully, in January I'll start my "Next Year in Israel" fund, to save up money to go visit Israel for two weeks. My guess is that $4,000 should do...but I might be off.