Poland

Population: 38,115,000
Jewish population: 5,000-20,000

On the eve of the Shoah, Poland was home to over three million Jews, the second-largest Jewish community in the world at the time. Warsaw, the capital, had a population of over 300,000 Jews, more than 30% of the population of the city—and a larger Jewish community than in most European countries. For sake of comparison, the Jewish population of Poland was greater than the total population of such countries as Ireland, Norway or each of the Baltic States. Following the German onslaught in 1939, about 85% of Polish Jewry was wiped out. Many Jews from other countries were deported to Nazi death camps in German-occupied Poland and murdered there. After World War II, most of the survivors refused to return to, or remain in, Poland, which was convulsed by civil war and antisemitic violence. Emigration accelerated after pogroms and other outrages, and the Jewish population continued to shrink through successive waves of emigration. Since the fall of Communism, the small Jewish community in Poland has been able to reassert its identity and today has a very high profile in public life. Most of the country's Jews live in Warsaw, but smaller communities also exist in Kraków, Wrocław, Łódź, Katowice, Szczecin, Gdańsk, and several other cities. The vast number of historical Jewish sites has proved a magnet for foreign visitors to Poland. In 2013, the new Museum of the History of Polish Jews was opened to the public.