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The Jewish People in 2126: Demography, identity and the future of a global minority
Author(s): DellaPergola, Sergio
Date: 2026
Topics: Demography, Main Topic: Demography and Migration, Jewish Peoplehood, Jewish Communal Futures
Abstract: In this policy paper: Renowned demographer and President of JPR’s European Jewish Demography Unit Professor Sergio DellaPergola explores possible futures for the Jewish People over the next century, not by making precise predictions, but by identifying the core structural forces that have shaped Jewish history and will continue to do so. It highlights the enduring complexity of Jewish identity and existence, examining not only whether the Jewish People will endure but also in what form. Some of the key findings and arguments in this policy paper: Three enduring questions will shape the Jewish future: What defines Jewish identity? How is it transmitted? How do Jews relate to non-Jews as a minority? How does the Jewish collective organise and defend its shared interests? Jewish existence will continue to rest on three interconnected pillars: Israel – a sovereign Jewish state, demographically strong but politically challenged; Diaspora – diverse minority communities, often influential but structurally vulnerable; the Israel–Diaspora relationship – a critical but fragile axis. Three key dynamics affect Jewish demographics: Ageing and low fertility in most Diaspora communities; higher fertility in Israel, especially among more religious groups; and potential long-term transformation of the Jewish population’s internal composition. Future migration patterns will depend heavily on political stability, economic conditions and levels of security and antisemitism. Assimilation and identity erosion remain major challenges, while new forms of ‘joining’ Judaism may emerge. Jews will continue to represent a tiny global minority, and Jewish life will continue to be shaped by external perceptions and pressures. At the same time, antisemitism is expected to persist in evolving forms. Israel is likely to become home to the majority of the world’s Jews within decades. This shift will redefine the meaning of Jewish peoplehood, its cultural and political priorities and the power dynamics within global Jewry. Rapid growth of more religious populations (particularly Haredim) may reshape economic structures, political systems and social cohesion. Leadership capacity must include three key requirements: the ability to unite diverse segments of the Jewish People, a realistic assessment of challenges and opportunities, and the development of new or improved shared decision-making frameworks.
Rebuilding Jewish Europe after the Fall of Communism, 1989-2000: a case of transnational circulation of narratives, resources and knowledge
Author(s): Dimentstein, Marcelo David
Date: 2024
Topics: International Aid and NGOs, Jewish Revival, Post-Communist Transitions, Main Topic: Other, Jewish Peoplehood, Jewish Renewal, Jewish Organisations, Fundraising and Philanthropy
Abstract: The fall of the Berlin Wall and the disappearance of the communist regimes in Europe represented a radical change for Judaism on the continent. The most striking change occurred, naturally, in Central and Eastern Europe, that is, in those countries that were behind the Iron Curtain, such as Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia or the German Democratic Republic. There, while the political decomposition of the Soviet bloc was gaining traction, thousands of people rediscovered their Jewish origins – forbidden, concealed, or silenced under communism, giving rise to a process of Jewish revivalism. In this context, numerous Jewish philanthropic organizations came to the region to support these developments with the mission of renewing local Jewish communities. The process involved a multitude of actors – Jewish agencies, organizations and foundations based in the United States, Europe and Israel – and entailed the mobilization of professionals, specialists and financial resources. This thesis explores the concrete dynamics of this cross-border mobilization of Jewish philanthropic bodies in favor of the Jewish communities of East Central Europe after the fall of communism in 1989. It studies in-depth the historical origins and evolution of transnational Jewish solidarity in modern times, enquires about the Jewish agencies and organizations that started to operate in Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall, especially, but not only, their sources of financing and the circulation of economic resources. Finally, it gives an account of the narrative corpus that emerged about European Jews before and during this process, identifying those actors who created and mobilized these narratives.
Еврейский народ в России: кто, как и зачем к нему принадлежит
Translated Title: The Jewish people in Russia: who, how and why belongs to it
Author(s): Осовцов Александр А.; Яковенко, Игорь А.
Date: 2011
Topics: Jewish Populations and Ethnicities: Ashkenazi, Jewish Populations and Ethnicities: Mountain Jews, Main Topic: Identity and Community, Jewish Peoplehood, Jewish Identity, Ethnicity, Assimilation, Religious Observance and Practice
Abstract: Книга содержит результаты комплексного социологического исследования российского еврейства, проведенного в 2010 году фондом "Общественная экспертиза" под руководством Игоря Яковенко. Результатом исследования стала представленная авторами гипотеза о структурно-функциональной модели еврейского мира, раскрывающая причины двух главных аномалий еврейского народа: механизма уникального трехтысяче-летнего выживания еврейской цивилизации и непропорционально большого вклада евреев в науку и культуру XX века.
В исследовании впервые дан сравнительный социологический анализ ашкеназов и горских евреев, в ходе которого доказана гипотеза о полиэтнической структуре российского еврейства.
Анализ фундаментального внутреннего противоречия между соблюдающими евреями "ядра" и ассимилированными евреями "оболочки", а также исследование "мембраны", отделяющей еврейский мир от нееврейского, позволили авторам выдвинуть гипотезу об ошибочности прогнозов об "умирании российского еврейства" и скором "конце еврейской цивилизации" и ее трансформации в неоэтнос.
Исходной точкой исследования стал семантический и социологический анализ понятия Jewish Peoplehood (принадлежность к еврейскому народу), которое, по мнению авторов, имеет шанс стать одной из несущих конструкций нового понятийного аппарата, необходимого для описания современного еврейства.
Jewish Politics, Women’s Politics, General Politics – The Experience of Project Kesher
Author(s): Yakimenko, Svetlana
Date: 2016
Topics: Main Topic: Other, Jewish Women, Jewish Peoplehood, Care and Welfare, Conflict Resolution and Reconciliation
Abstract: Since 1989 Project Kesher has worked bringing women together, creating a network of Jewish women, helping women who knew nothing or very little about what it means to be Jewish, not only to become Jewish, but to create and strengthen Jewish community life in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia and Moldova. We shared success and analyzed the changes. We felt that we were one people.

Due to the present political crises we lost our vision as one Jewish people, we became divided. It was clear Project Kesher needed to take action. We started with International Skype calls. Every evening one woman from Russia, one from Ukraine, one from Belarus, one from Israel called a woman in another country: talking, sharing our love and support, wishing peace. When women started calling each other again and restoring broken relationships we saw that “KESHER” – connection – is working.

One day when there was a serious military clash in the area where she lived one of our leaders proposed to read Tehilim (Psalms), as prayers for peace. Soon more than one hundred women were reading Psalms, creating a chain of peace. Such a spirit of peace prevailed even at a time when the air was filled with war.

In Russia there are refugee families from different regions of the Ukraine. Sometimes they lost everything. Project Kesher women’s groups in cooperation with other Jewish organizations collected clothes, foot-wear as well as school-bags, school record books, sketchbooks, colored paper, paperboard, plasticine, pencil boxes, paints and markers for refugee children. Project Kesher activists also actively participated in organizing camps for refugees in Kharkiv and the Dnipropretrovsk region (Ukraine).

In times of conflict the wish to live in peace is not enough. Women needed instruments for conflict resolution. Project Kesher developed a unique leadership training program with the aim to enable the participants to conduct trainings in conflict resolution themselves in Jewish communities and partner organizations and to engage in mediation. These trainings are often based on Jewish tradition and text study.

A special event is Project Kesher’s Global Women’s Seder that was celebrated in 2015 for the 21st time. No less than 2500 members of 140 Project Kesher women’s and youth groups in 110 cities and five countries – Belarus, Georgia, Israel, Russia and the Ukraine – participated this year. The participants spoke about peace and declared that they intended to do everything possible to maintain peace in their families and in society. With the energy it sets free Project Kesher continues to initiate positive changes.
Does European Jewry Need a New Ethnic Spiritual Umbrella? Reflections
Author(s): Gorny, Yosef
Editor(s): Gloeckner, Olaf; Schoeps, Julius H.
Date: 2011
Topics: Main Topic: Other, Jewish Peoplehood, European Union, Jewish Leadership and Representation, Jewish Organisations: Representative and Umbrella Bodies, Diaspora and Relations Between Diaspora Countries
The European Jewish Diaspora: The Third Pillar of World Jewry?
Author(s): Sheffer, Gabriel
Editor(s): Gloeckner, Olaf; Schoeps, Julius H.
Date: 2011
Topics: Diaspora and Relations Between Diaspora Countries, Main Topic: Other, Jewish Peoplehood
Historicity, Peoplehood, and Politics: Holocaust Talk in Twenty-First-Century France
Author(s): Arkin, Kimberly A.
Date: 2018
Topics: Main Topic: Holocaust and Memorial, Jewish Populations and Ethnicities: North African, National Identity, Jewish Identity, Holocaust Commemoration, Holocaust, Media: Jewish Media, Newspapers, Magazines and Periodicals, Ethnography, Jewish Peoplehood
Abstract: Drawing on ethnographic data from the mid-2000s as well as accounts from French Jewish newspapers and magazines from the 1980s onward, this paper traces the emergence of new French Jewish institutional narratives linking North African Jews to the “European” Holocaust. I argue that these new narratives emerged as a response to the social and political impasses produced by intra-Jewish disagreements over whether and how North African Jews could talk about the Holocaust, which divided French Jews and threatened the relationship between Jewishness and French national identity. These new pedagogical narratives relied on a very different historicity, or way of reckoning time and causality, than those used in more divisive everyday French Jewish Holocaust narratives. By reworking the ways that French Jews reckoned time and causality, they offered an expansive and homogenously “European” Jewishness. This argument works against a growing postcolonial sociological and anthropological literature on religious minorities in France and Europe by emphasizing the contingency, difficulty, and even ambivalence around constructing “Jewishness” as transparently either “European” or “French.” It also highlights the role played by historicity—not just history—in producing what counts as group “identity.”
Limmud International - Contributing to the Global Jewish Conversation
Editor(s): Ravid, Shlomi
Date: 2012
Topics: Main Topic: Education, Jewish Education, Jewish Peoplehood, Limmud, Globalisation
Abstract:

The Limmud mission, which emphasizes learning, diversity and community, has proven to be a compelling set of values. These values are central to international groups. Studies have shown that Limmud participants are highly likely to travel internationally and recognize that they are part of a global community. However, this is not enough. The question that needs to be addressed entails how being a member of an international community can help us strengthen the Jewish people.
Counting as one: Moral encounters and criteria of affinity in a Polish Jewish congregation
Translated Title: En être: enjeux moraux et critères d’affinité dans une congrégation juive polonaise
Author(s): Lorenz, Jan
Date: 2015
Topics: Main Topic: Identity and Community, Jewish Revival, Jewish Community, Ethnography, Synagogues, Jewish Peoplehood, Politics: Jewish Internal Communal Politics
Abstract: The resurgence and transformation of Poland’s Jewish communal institutions and religious life in the last twenty years has inspired debate concerning the criteria for being and becoming Jewish. The voices in that discussion come not only from different generations, but also from different geographies of Jewish life. Drawing on fieldwork in a contemporary Jewish congregation in Poland, this article discusses ethics in the context of different rationalities of affinity. Poland’s “Jewish revival” confronted values and affects grounded in intergenerational experiences of the post-Holocaust era with categories of belonging and religious conversion enabled by new laws, transnational programs of education and socialization, and the impact of religious leaders from abroad. The apparent incommensurability of these standpoints, and the taxing attempts at their reconciliation, invite us to reconceptualize the notion of moral tradition.
Jewish Peoplehood in Hungary: a Challenge and an Opportunity
Author(s): Balazs, Gabor; Cernov, Mircea
Date: 2012
Topics: Main Topic: Identity and Community, Jewish Leadership and Representation, Jewish Community, Jewish Revival, Jewish Peoplehood, Jewish Organisations
Abstract:

The lack of leadership in the Jewish community in Hungary prevents an obstacle to the promotion of Jewish peoplehood as a focal point for developing the community of tomorrow. The Hungarian Jewish community suffers from a weak and ineffective structure and a lack of leadership. Nevertheless, the last decade has witnessed a revival of Jewish life in Hungary, with a particular focus on Jewish peoplehood. This focus is both a challenge and an opportunity for the Jewish community in Hungary.
The Israelization of British Jewry: Balancing between home and homeland
Author(s): Greene, Toby; Shain, Yossi
Date: 2016
Topics: Politics, Israel Tours and Programmes, Israel Attachment, Jewish Community, Main Topic: Identity and Community, Jewish Peoplehood, Diaspora-Israel Relations
Abstract: Israel is increasingly the epicentre of Jewish peoplehood, shaping the lives of diaspora Jews as both an engine driving interconnectedness and a source of division. ‘Israelization’ impacts diaspora Jews differently according to country of domicile. This article examines British Jewry, providing historical context and drawing on interviews to explore the community’s shifting identity and culture. It argues that Britain represents a unique model between America and France. In America, where security is greater, Jewish ethnic ties are loosening, whereas in France, doubts over the Jewish community’s future increase their focus on Israel. While British Jews experience hostility, they feel safer than in France. Flourishing British Jewish culture reflects commitment to multi-ethnic Britain, alongside loyalty to Israel. The dynamics of those loyalties are changing, however, with dissent against Israeli policies increasingly legitimised. We conclude that the Israelization of British Jewry is all encompassing, even while allowing for a thriving diaspora community.
Jewry between tradition and secularism: Europe and Israel compared
Editor(s): Ben-Rafael , Eliezer; Gergely, Thomas; Gorny, Yosef
Date: 2006
Topics: Jewish Peoplehood, Main Topic: Identity and Community, Comparisons: Between Diaspora and Israel, Comparisons: Between Diaspora Jewish Populations and Communities
Abstract: Are Jews today still the carriers of a single and identical collective identity and do they still constitute a single people? This two-fold question arises when one compares a Hassidi Habad from Brooklyn, a Jewish professor at a secular university in Brussels, a traditional Yemeni Jew still living in Sana’a, a Galilee kibbutznik, or a Russian Jew in Novossibirsk. Is there still today a significant relationship between these individuals who all subscribe to Judaism? The analysis shows that the Jewish identity is multiple and can be explained by considering all variants as “surface structures” of the three universal “deep structures” central to the notion of collective identity, namely, collective commitment, perceptions of the collective’s singularity, and positioning vis-à-vis “others.”

Contents:

Preface
Judaism and the culture of memory /Thomas Gergely
Introduction
European Jewry and Klal Yisrael /Eliezer Ben-Rafael, Thomas Gergely, and Yosef Gorny
Is the French model in decline? /Pierre Birnbaum
Case of Belgium /Jean-Philippe Schreiber
Identity of Dutch Jews /Ludo Abicht
Russian-Jewish immigration to Germany /Julius H. Schoeps, Willi Jasper, and Olaf Glöckner
Religiosity, praxis, and tradition in contemporary Hungarian Jewry /András Kovács
Being Jewish in Romania after the second world war /Carol Iangu
Jewish identity, memory, and anti-Semitism /Maurice Konopnicki
Siamese twins: religion and secularism in Jewish national thought /Yosef Gorny
Israeli identity and mission in Buber's thought /Shalom Ratzabi
Sovereignty, voluntarism, and Jewish identity: Nathan Rotenstreich /Avi Bareli
On religious-secular tensions /Avi Sagi
Religious-secular cleavage in contemprary Israel /Yochanan Peres
On European Jewish Orthodoxy, Sephardic tradition, and the Shas movement /Zvi Zohar
Ultra-Orthodox, Orthodox, and secular women in college /Lior Ben-Chaim Rafael
Challenge of secularism to Jewish survival in Abba Hillel Silver's thinking /Ofer Shiff
Identities of Jewish American women /Suzanne Vromen
Jews and secularization: a challenge or a prospect? /Guy Haarscher
Submission and subversion before the law /Rivon Krygier
Tradition of diaspora and political reality of the state of Israel /David Meyer
Diaspora museum and Israeli-Jewish identity /Dina Porat
Jewish transnational community and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem /Uri Cohen
Contemporary dilemmas of identity: Israel and the diaspora /Eliezer Ben-Rafael
Was the Shoah the "sanctification of God"? /Thomas Gergely.
Diasporans dialektik: Om konsten att vara judisk i den svenska moderniteten
Translated Title: The dialectics of Diaspora On the art of being Jewish in Swedish modernity
Author(s): Dencik, Lars
Date: 2009
Topics: Jewish Identity, Jewish Community, Multiculturalism, Jewish Relations With Non-Jews, Jewish Peoplehood, Main Topic: Identity and Community
Abstract: Judarna i Sverige utgör en etnisk och kulturell minoritet som har bevarat och utvecklat ett särskilt »judiskt« förhållningssätt till tillvaron. I denna artikel perspektiveras vad »ett judiskt förhållingssätt« bygger på och innebär. Utifrån det frågas hur den specifika judiska tanketraditionen, dess uppfattning av begreppen religion och folktillhörighet, och i synnerhet predikamentet att leva som minoritet i diasporan samverkat till att den judiska gruppen i dag på en och samma gång kan vara en distinkt nationell minoritet i Sverige och väl integrerade i det moderna samhället.
Global Affinities: Portuguese Marranos (Anusim), Traveling Jews, and Cultural Logics of Kinship
Author(s): Leite, Naomi
Date: 2011
Topics: Jewish Populations and Ethnicities: Anusim / Crypto-Jews / Marranos, Main Topic: Identity and Community, Ethnography, Jewish Community, Jewish Identity, Jewish Peoplehood, Diaspora and Relations Between Diaspora Countries, Globalisation, Tourism, Jewish Populations and Ethnicities: Sephardi, Jewish Community: Affiliation, Engagement and Involvement
Abstract: This dissertation explores issues of identification, relatedness, and belonging on a global scale, through an ethnographic study of Portugal’s urban Marranos (descendants of fifteenth-century forced converts to Catholicism) and foreign Jews who travel from abroad to meet them. Although not Jewish according to Jewish law, given centuries of intermarriage, Marranos are nonetheless widely considered to be part of “the Jewish family,” “lost brethren” who should be welcomed back to the Jewish people. Many Jews view them within the metanarrative of Jewish destruction and survival, the “eternal spark” that remains despite the Inquisition’s attempted elimination of Judaism from the Portuguese landscape. However, for numerous local reasons the present-day Marranos are not welcomed by Portugal’s tiny normative Jewish community. As a result, the urban Marranos, who feel strongly that they are Jews by descent, turn to foreign Jewish travelers as sources of educational, spiritual, and material assistance in their bid to join
the Jewish world and attain recognition as Jews in the present. Based on two years of fieldwork in Marrano organizations in Lisbon and Porto and traveling alongside Jewish tourists and outreach workers, the dissertation undertakes a processual analysis of the constitution of ancestral Jewish identity and of the role of transnational, cross-cultural affective ties in affording a sense of global Jewish belonging. The primary questions driving this work are, first, how and why do far-flung people come to feel that they are related to one another, and what terms do they use to characterize and think through that feeling of relatedness? Second, to what extent are their perceptions of essential connection disrupted or transformed by face-to-face contact? By interrogating the cultural logics of kinship writ large—the language and conceptual frameworks people use to articulate and make sense of their feelings of relatedness to
one another—and then examining how those logics play out “on the ground,” this study provides a fine-grained ethnographic analysis of the mechanisms through which global and ancestral imaginings become concretized in social interaction. Ultimately, I argue, physical proximity remains the productive sphere for identification and belonging, even as global interconnection provides new opportunities for encounter.
Contemporary Jewries: Convergence and Divergence
Editor(s): Ben-Rafael, Eliezer; Gorny, Yosef; Ro'i, Yaakov
Date: 2003
Topics: Main Topic: Identity and Community, Jewish Identity, Jewish Community, Jewish Peoplehood, Diaspora and Relations Between Diaspora Countries
Abstract: This is a book about Klal Yisrael, the worldwide commonwealth of the Jewish people. The main question asked, is whether one can still speak of 'one' Jewish people, encompassing all Jews in the world.

The Jewish collective identity stands at new crossroads of multicultural ideologies and transnational diasporism. Jewry is experiencing an existential problem in today's changing society, shifting between convergence and unity on the one hand and divergence and division on the other hand. Quo vadis, O Jewish people? Rather than fully answering this question, researchers from Israel, the United States, Brazil, Argentina, Ukraine, Russia, France and Belgium try to open up the discussion in this book.
Soviet Jewishness and Cultural Studies
Author(s): Gershenson, Olga; Shneer, David
Date: 2011
Topics: Migration: Aliyah and Olim, Jewish Peoplehood, Diaspora and Relations Between Diaspora Countries, Diaspora-Israel Relations, Main Topic: Culture and Heritage
Abstract: In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
In 2009 Natan Sharansky, formerly an iconic Soviet refusenik and now an Israeli politician, was named chairman of the Jewish Agency for Israel, the wing of the Israeli government historically charged with fostering Jewish immigration to Israel, traditionally known as aliya. Sharansky, however, immediately reformulated the central mission of the Jewish Agency away from aliya and toward the strengthening of secular Jewish identity around the world. The Forward reported:

At the center of Sharansky's plan is the notion of peoplehood. He and a tight group of ideological allies—mostly other Russian Jews—believe that the Jewish Agency must now become a global promoter of Jewish identity, particularly among the young. Peoplehood, according to its proponents, is defined as a sense of connectivity between Jews who share a common history and fate.

With Sharansky's ascent to this particular position and the concurrent shift in the Jewish Agency's mission from fomenter of migration to builder of secular Jewish identity, Soviet Jews have moved to the center of conversations about Jewish identity and culture. These new developments give reason to think seriously about Soviet Jewish culture and its impact on global Jewish culture. Indeed, a growing number of books and articles on the subject indicate that there is a new body of scholarship, defined by a cultural studies approach to the Soviet and post-Soviet Jewish experience. These new studies come from varied disciplines, such as history, anthropology, film studies, and literary criticism, to name a few, but they all put culture and cultural production at the center of scholarship on Soviet and post-Soviet Jewish community and identity. We call this emerging field "Soviet Jewish Cultural Studies." This newly developing field sweeps across temporal and spatial boundaries. It encompasses Jewish experiences in both the Soviet and post-Soviet eras, as well as within the borders of the Former Soviet Union and outside of it, in Israel, North America, or elsewhere, wherever Soviet and post-Soviet Jews have migrated. What the subjects of all of this research have in common is the experience of having lived under the Soviet Union with its radical experiments in Jewish identity and culture.

Scholars working in this emerging field generally do not look at Soviet and post-Soviet Jews through the more traditional lenses of vanishing diasporas, Soviet anti-Semitism, and the disappearance of Yiddish and Hebrew cultures. Rather than approaching the Jewish experience of Soviet Jews with presumptions of what it means to be Jewish, and whether in fact Soviet Jews measure up, this scholarship asks what it means to be Jewish in a Soviet and post-Soviet context. In what ways is Jewishness performed and represented? By taking a birds-eye, interdisciplinary view, we want to redefine the field of Soviet Jewish Studies, and to use particular examples of the new research to suggest what a cultural studies approach reveals about Soviet and post-Soviet Jewish culture. We will demonstrate first that scholars of Soviet Jewish Cultural Studies have focused on new forms of Jewish practice that have sometimes supplanted traditional religious practices. Secondly, we show that this body of scholarship in Soviet Jewish Cultural Studies complicates the idea that twentieth century Jewish history is a history of assimilation, a movement downward from authentic Jewish practice rooted in Jewish languages to the end of a distinctive Jewish life. Most importantly, this new scholarship takes a global rather than national perspective, since post-Soviet Jewry is one of the most transnational in contemporary Jewish life. Thus, in a post-Soviet, post-Zionist, post-assimilationist moment in global Jewish culture, this group of Jews with their unique cultural history may be placed at the center, not periphery, of the global Jewish experience. Therefore, the body of scholarship forming Soviet Jewish Cultural Studies has much to offer to scholars in Jewish and Russian Studies, as well as Diaspora Studies.
European Jewry in 2030
Author(s): Maimon, Dov
Date: 2010
Topics: Jewish Communal Futures, Economy and Economics, Jewish Peoplehood, Main Topic: Other
Abstract: This background paper is based on the methodology and categories described extensively in JPPI’s report 2030: Alternative Futures for the Jewish People. Beyond the external and internal drivers identified as critical for the Jewish people at the global level, the future thriving or decline of European Jewries will depend upon some specific drivers linked to the geopolitical, economic and cultural environment of the region.
Will We Have Jewish Grandchildren? Jewish Continuity and How to Achieve It
Author(s): Sacks, Jonathan
Date: 1994
Topics: Jewish Continuity, Assimilation, Intermarriage, Jewish Peoplehood, Main Topic: Other
Abstract: The Jewish people, having survived for thousands of years in the most adverse circumstances, including the Holocaust, is today threatened by intermarriage and assimilation. Jewish communities throughout the diaspora are experiencing demographic decline. Why has this happened, and can anything be done to reverse the trend?