On April 12, 2026, on the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day, the Holocaust Survivors’ Rights Authority published new data on people whose personal biographies remain a living testimony to one of the most terrible tragedies in the history of the Jewish people. According to this data, about 111,000 Holocaust survivors live in Israel today. All of them are over 80 years old, and almost a third have already crossed the 90-year mark.
This is not just statistics for a report and not an ordinary demographic summary. For Israel, such figures carry special weight because they concern a generation that went through destruction, exile, humiliation, camps, ghettos, persecution, and then helped build and strengthen the Jewish state. And the closer the country approaches another memorial date, the more acutely not only the historical responsibility is felt, but also the question of time: the number of direct memory bearers is decreasing.
At the same time, the picture of Jewish history has radically changed over the past decades. If in 1939, on the eve of World War II, there were about 16.6 million Jews in the world, then at the beginning of 2025, as reported with reference to the news service “Kan,” there were about 15.8 million. In other words, even decades after the Holocaust, the Jewish people have still not restored their pre-war numbers.
Israel has become the main center of the Jewish world
Against this background, another indicator is especially significant. If in 1939 only about 449,000 Jews lived in the territory of present-day Israel, which is about 3% of the world’s Jewry, today about 7.2 million Jews live in the State of Israel — about 45% of all Jews in the world.
This figure says much more than it seems at first glance. After the Holocaust, the center of gravity of the Jewish people shifted not just geographically, but civilizationally. Israel has become not only a place of national revival but also the main space of Jewish security, memory, and historical continuity.
The USA remains the second largest center of Jewish population — about 6.3 million people, or approximately 40% of the world’s Jewry. But it is Israel today that bears a special moral burden because here the memory of the Holocaust exists not at a distance and not only in museums, but within families, cities, archives, school curricula, state symbolism, and everyday language.
Who today is among the Holocaust survivors
According to the published data, all Holocaust survivors living in Israel today are over 80 years old. About 28% have already reached the age of 90 and older. Women make up 63% of this group, men — 37%.
Almost half of them, 49.3%, are widows or widowers. At the same time, about 9,300 married couples, in which both spouses survived the Holocaust, still live in Israel. This detail sounds especially strong: behind the dry numbers are not only the fates of individual people but also entire families that managed to survive after the destruction of Europe, create a home, raise children, and live to a time when the memory of the Holocaust is already transitioning from personal testimony to historical heritage.
It is also important that Israeli statistics include not only former camp and ghetto prisoners in Europe. It also includes Jews from Iraq who survived the Farhud events in 1941, as well as natives of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia who were subjected to restrictions, discrimination, and persecution during the Vichy regime and Nazi influence. This broadens the very view of the Holocaust and shows that the memory of it in Israeli society has long gone beyond just the Central European narrative.
From the former USSR to Morocco: what the map of memory looks like within Israel
About 60% of Holocaust survivors living in Israel today were born in Europe. The largest group among them is from the former Soviet Union, about 36%. This is not surprising: a significant part of the Holocaust survivors from the USSR repatriated to Israel during the Great Aliyah of the 1990s, and according to available data, about 84% of this category arrived at that time.
Another approximately 37% of Holocaust survivors are natives of Asia and Africa. Among them, those from Morocco stand out — 16.9%, as well as from Iraq — 10.9%. For modern Israel, this is a very important emphasis because it breaks the simplified notion that the history of the Holocaust and anti-Semitic persecutions of the war period concerns only the Ashkenazi experience of Europe.
In this context, NAnews — Israel News | Nikk.Agency considers it especially important to remind: the memory of the Holocaust in Israel is multilingual, multi-community, and deeply intertwined with the history of Jews from Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. It is not only a memory of the past but a living fabric of Israeli identity, in which the fates of families from Lviv, Baghdad, Casablanca, Odessa, Bucharest, and Tunis converge in one national home.
The data from the Ministry of Aliyah and Integration deserve special attention. Over the past ten years, since 2016, 2,316 Holocaust survivors have repatriated to Israel. And after October 7, 2023, about 120 more people from this category arrived in the Jewish state. Most of these repatriates arrived in 2022 — 815 people.
These figures make us look at the word “repatriation” in a new way. For some, it is the path of a young specialist, for others — a family decision, and for some, it is a return to Israel already in deep old age, after a lifetime and after all the traumas of the 20th century. As of April 2026, 40,136 Holocaust survivors who repatriated to the country since 1989 live in Israel.
Where Holocaust survivors live today
Today, Holocaust survivors are settled throughout the country, but about 95% of them live in cities. The largest number resides in Haifa — about 7,500 people. Next is Jerusalem, where about 7,100 Holocaust survivors live, Tel Aviv–Jaffa with about 6,000, Ashdod — about 5,500, and Netanya — about 5,400 people.
The fact that Haifa ranks first also looks symbolic. This city has long been one of the largest centers of aliyah, social adaptation, and multilingual memory in Israel. Here, the connection between the biographies of people who went through Europe, the USSR, North Africa, and the Middle East and the modern life of the country is especially strongly felt.
Memory moves from statistics to moral duty
The fewer direct witnesses remain, the greater the responsibility of society. Israel today preserves not just a large number of Holocaust survivors, but the last living line of connection with a generation that can say not “we studied,” but “we experienced it.” And that is why each new publication of such statistics is perceived not as a formality, but as a reminder: time has a limit, but memory should not have an expiration date.
Against the backdrop of the fact that the number of world Jewry has still not reached the level of 1939, this topic sounds even heavier. The State of Israel became a historical response to the defenselessness of Jews in the past, but this response does not relieve the obligation to remember, care, and speak honestly about what happened.
Therefore, the figure of 111,000 is not just the demography of April 2026. It is 111,000 reasons why Holocaust Remembrance Day in Israel remains not a ritual, but a nerve of national life. And as long as at least one person is alive who can tell how the world reached the abyss, the Jewish state and the entire Jewish people have not only the obligation to listen but also the obligation to do everything to ensure that such a thing never happens again.