The estimated Jewish population in the United States is over 5,000,000 of whom some 2,294,000 live in New York City, the American Jewish Committee disclosed yesterday.
The information is based on a special survey conducted for AJC’s 55th annual American Jewish Yearbook, 1954, which will be published soon. In conducting the survey, questionnaires were completed by more than 700 communities throughout the United States where sizable numbers of Jews reside. The final result was obtained from these questionnaires plus a projection for the remaining communities.
Comparing the 1953 estimate for New York with the 1950 estimate of 2,100,000, the AJC said that the difference between the two was probably a result of the superior techniques used in the current survey, rather than an appreciable increase in the New York Jewish population.
The Committee pointed out that the same study showed a considerable growth in Jewish population in New York City’s suburbs, consistent with the general middle class trend of migration from New York City proper. Thirty-three out of thirty-four New York suburbs reported an increase of Jewish population; almost all the communities attributed the increase to a recent influx from New York City. In view of this outward movement, the AJC held, it was unlikely that the population of Jews within the city had increased appreciably.
The questionnaire and projection method of estimating the Jewish population in the U.S. was necessitated by the absence of any official government census of religious groups. In 1926 and 1936 the United States Bureau of the Census conducted decennial tallies of religious bodies. In 1946, however, no such census was taken.
PAST ESTIMATES ON JEWISH POPULATION CONSIDERED ERRONEOUS
Because more than 40 percent of the Jewish population in the United States lives in New York City, the AJC said, an accurate New York estimate was crucial to insure the reliability of the nationwide estimate. To arrive at the New York total, the authors of the Yearbook survey, Ben Seligman and Alvin Chenkin, used an unpublished study of the Jewish Education Committee which established the number of Jewish school children in New York by the so-called “Yom Kippur” method.
This method consists of obtaining the number of children absent from New York City schools above the norm on the Jewish religious holiday of Yom Kippur, and assuming them all to be Jewish. The Yearbook authors then computed the total Jewish population of New York by using the known ratio between the number of children in the school age bracket and the general population.
In presenting the national estimate of “over 5,000,000” the AJC said that past estimates which had equaled or exceeded this figure were undoubtedly in error. These errors had occurred, the AJC stated, by taking old community records of doubtful accuracy, and projecting them on the basis of an assumed natural increase equal to the average natural increase of the American population. Recent studies, the AJC pointed out, have demonstrated the unreliability of this assumption because American Jews have a lower rate of natural increase than the general population. This is due to a somewhat lower birth rate among Jews than the average of the general American population, the Committee said.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
