What % of 1st generation Israelis were Holocaust survivors?
How are you defining first-generation Israelis? Do you mean people who were citizens of the State of Israel when it was first formed in May 1948? Some of those had been born there, but do you still count them as first-generation?
People who lived there at founding/immigrated at the time.
Also, how are you defining “Holocaust survivor”?
Holocaust survivor=Alive when camp was liberated or war ended.
My parents, most of their surviving family and many acquaintances they connect with after liberation went to Israel to fight. My parents stayed three years, the bulk of my family is still there. My impression is that it was a fairly significant number.
This gives 136,000 Displaced European Jews who were left in Europe after the war ending up in Israel. It’s talking about Jews who were in allied run displaced person camps after the end of WWII, at least some of whom were probably not literally taken from Concentration Camps but rather were enroute to those camps, in hiding or forced out of thier homes by later progroms.
But in anycase, 136,000 is probably a good upper bound.
Not everybody was in a camp, you know. My grandparents were both most definitely survivors, to the point where they received reparations from the German government, but my grandfather was in a Czech prison camp rather than a concentration camp; my grandmother lived under the Nazis, but after her region was conquered by the Soviets, she ended up being deported with her family to Siberia. Many survivors lived because they hid under assumed identities, fled to the partisans in the woods, managed to flee Nazi territory before being deported to a camp, etc.
Simplicio, that seems to be my answer right there.
Technically not - you asked for a percentage. Anybody know what the population of Israel was in 1948?
I found (and then lost) a cite that says almost 1 in 3 Israelis were Holocaust survivors in 1949. That seems exaggerated since population estimates for Israel in 1948 range between 544,000 and 2.2 million with 800,000-900,000 a commonly accepted range.
Part of the problem with population figures is that the only reliable count was a British census of Palestine in 1946, that was not consistent with the 1948 boundaries of Israel and Jordan. Between 1946 and 1948 there was a huge, but not well-counted immigration of Jews into Palestine. The immigrants came not just from former Nazi territory, but also from Eastern Europe, northern Africa and other areas in the Middle East.
If we take 500,000 (a little more than half the total population) as the number of Jews in Israel in 1948 and accept Simplicio’s cite of 136,000 as the number of emigrees displaced from Nazi-occupied territory, that’s about 27% – somewhere within spitting distance of the “1 in 3” figure in my lost cite.
Define “at the time”. May 1948? All of 1948? 1948–1958? People started immigrating to the state as soon as it was founded, and there are still people immigrating for the first time today. It’s not as though all Jews in Europe miraculously teleported to Israel the instant it was created.