The “Hall of Names” commemorating victims of the Holocaust at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. Photo: David Shankbone via Wikimedia Commons.

JNS.org – Eighty-one years after the Holocaust, the global Jewish population is still short of the 16.6 million estimated to have been alive on the eve of the war in 1939, with Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics reporting ahead of Yom Hashoah that there were 14.7 million Jews worldwide at the end of 2018.

According to the IBS, the global Jewish population is 100,000 short of the 1925 figure, with 45 percent living in Israel (6.7 million). The United States has the second largest Jewish population at 5.7 million, followed by France (450,000) Canada (392,000), the United Kingdom (292,000), Argentina (180,000), Russia (165,000), Germany (180,000) and Australia (116,000).

Yom Hashoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day, is marked in Israel on the 27th of the Hebrew month of Nisan, to pay tribute to Jewish resistance on the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

This year, Yom Hashoah falls from Monday night to Tuesday night, April 20-21.