Part III

So What?

There are three very important consequences of this. 1] The religious Jews are a much more important part of American Jewry than is generally acknowledged; 2] This is another argument that the Israeli Law of Return should be tightened; 3] It may be that most of the world's Jews are already in Israel.

1] The religious Jewish population is often belittled. The Reform and Conservative claim that we are a tiny proportion of America's Jews: 5-9% at most. However we make up at least a quarter of the Hardcore Jewish Population. That is not a proportion that can be dismissed, and by most objective measures of commitment, we are extremely committed to being Jewish, much more so than other sectors.

2] Though there are only 2.32 million Hardcore American Jews, the current Law of Return would probably recognize close to 10 million as entitled to full rights ("Total Persons in Qualifying Jewish Households"). The experience with well over a quarter of a million Russian non-Jews has not made us eager to try hundreds of thousands of American non-Jews. It should be recalled that in the mid-80s the chance of 850,000 people immigrating to Israel from the Soviet Union looked no more likely than the chances of a similar immigration from America look now.

3] We are talking about Hardcore Jews. There are 5 million Jews in Israel (according to the Israeli government's Central Bureau of Statistics). Virtually all of these are Hardcore Jews, without question including Meretz and Shinui Jews who are virulently anti-religious. Calculating quickly, using the numbers given by Professor Sergio DellaPergola for 2001: Outside of America the total Jewish population (C.I.S. (.5), U.K. (.5), France (.5), Argentina (.2), Canada (.36), all other (.5)) is 2.56 million. Even if we just assume these are all Hardcore Jews (a strongly optimistic assumption) we have a total of only 4.88 million Hardcore Jews outside of Israel. If we guess that only about half the non-American Jews are Hardcore, then it is clear that Israel has well over half of the Hardcore Jews in the world today.

This gives a total of less than 10 million Hardcore Jews in the entire world, much lower than the 12.9 million Jews claimed by a recent conference organized by the Jewish Agency.

A version of the article appears in the current (November) issue of the Jewish Observer.

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