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JERUSALEM, December 4, 2002 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Despite controversy, the government-funded Israel Council for Demography was revived after being dormant for five years.  The council discourages Jewish abortions and intermarriage and encourages Jews to have more children with incentives such as housing benefits and other grants.  The recognition that an official abortion-discouraging council is needed is due to a ‘demographic crisis’ made public by a study released Tuesday showing the Jewish population outside Israel is declining at an alarming rate.  According to figures from the Jewish Agency’s Institute for Jewish People Policy Planning, there are now some 12.9 million Jews down from estimates of 13.2 million earlier this year.

The main decline in the Jewish population seems to be in the U.S. where there has been a decline of 300,000, from 5.5 million in 1990 to 5.2 million in 2002.  While 300,000 Jews are estimated to have emigrated to the U.S. during the 1990s, the community lost some 50,000 Jews a year, mostly to natural attrition.

Prof. Sergio della Pergola, an expert on demographics, gave an example of the crisis when he noted that, “last year alone in Russia there were 8,000 deaths of elderly Jews, and only 600 births recorded to Jewish mothers.”  See the AP and H’aaretz reports:  https://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20021203/ap_on_re_mi_ea/israel_demography_1 https://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=236983&contrassID=2&subContrassID=1&sbSubContrassID=0