- Population
- 159,800
- Location
- Throughout Jewish Israel, densest in the Tel Aviv metropolis, Haifa, Jerusalem and Bnei Brak
Polish Jews and their children number about 160,000 in Israel, though only some 23,500 were born in Poland, most of them now over 75. They arrived in waves, from the pioneers of the 1920s who built much of Tel Aviv to Holocaust survivors after 1945 and those expelled in Poland's 1968 anti-Zionist campaign, and they supplied much of the country's founding leadership. Their culture is so absorbed into mainstream Ashkenazi Israeli life that it is rarely marked as separate, but landsmanshaft associations still gather each year to mourn the destroyed towns of Krakow, Warsaw and Bialystok. The Holocaust shapes their memory, and since 2023 thousands of their descendants have also sought Polish passports.