Tuesday, November 22, 2016

Population Figures of Frankfurt

10,000 Jews in Frankfurt around 1860
35,000 in 1933
Hirsch community 2,000 in 1920s, the general community had around 30,000
Generally, Hirsch's community was around 10% of the general.

data from Dr. Rachel Heuberger in TorahInMotion.org

Rabbi Shimshon Raphael Hirsch and Contemporary Orthodoxy- A Panel Discussion with all the Speakers


Let us bring these figures as objections to comments by R' Dessler and other Eastern Europeans about the ability of Torah Im Derech Eretz to produce as many gadolim as they did in EE. Eastern Europe had millions of people. Even in 1920, Frankfurt had only 30,000. In 1933, Eastern Europe had more than 6 million Jews.

The majority of Jews in prewar Europe resided in eastern Europe. The largest Jewish communities in this area were in Poland, with about 3,000,000 Jews (9.5%); the European part of the Soviet Union, with 2,525,000 (3.4%); and Romania, with 756,000 (4.2%). The Jewish population in the three Baltic states totaled 255,000: 95,600 in Latvia, 155,000 in Lithuania, and 4,560 in Estonia. Here, Jews comprised 4.9%, 7.6%, and 0.4% of each country's population, respectively, and 5% of the region's total population. (Holocaust Museum)
So let's do some math. 30,000 Jews in Frankfurt, 3,000 of them in Hirsch's community. 6 million Jews in Eastern Europe. The Jewish population of all of Frankfurt was a 1/2 of a percent of that of Eastern Europe. And the population of Hirsch's community was less than a 1000th of Eastern Europe. So what are we comparing?

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