Abstract
The Canadian Jewish population has seen only modest growth in the past 20 years, following a more significant increase between 1981 and 1991. The latter decade coincided with the beginning of significant immigration by Jews from the Former Soviet Union. Jews reside in every region of Canada including the Northern Territories, although they are concentrated heavily in the major urban centers. The metropolitan area of Toronto is home to 188,710 Jews and includes about half (48.2%) of Canada’s Jewish population. The Montreal community numbers 90,780 Jews. The median age of Canadian Jews is slightly older than the national average but much older than ethnic groups with large numbers of more recent immigrants. The Canadian Jewish population has a slightly larger proportion of children (age 0–14) than the total population (18.2% and 17.0% respectively) and a significantly larger proportion of persons over age 65 than the overall Canadian population (16.9% and 13.9% respectively). There are 57,195 Jews who live below the poverty line in Canada, comprising 14.6% of 391,330 members of the Jewish population. The level of child poverty in the national Jewish population is 13.7%. At the other end of the age distribution, 10,395 of Jewish seniors are poor, representing 15.7% of those age 65 and over.
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Notes
- 1.
A census is also distributed in the middle of every decade (most recently in May of 2016), but it does not contain a religion question and, therefore, is much less useful for identifying Jews.
- 2.
In the case of Jewish communities, it is possible that the ultra-Orthodox were also under-represented in the final count.
- 3.
For a more comprehensive description of the erosion of the utility of and the problems associated with using both the ethnicity and religion variables in identifying Canadian Jews, see Weinfeld and Schnoor (2015).
- 4.
More specifically, the US Census asks only one ethnicity-related question identifying respondents of Hispanic or Latino descent. The American Community Survey, an annual demographic study of the US population, does ask questions on “ancestry” and language spoken at home.
- 5.
The NHS does not ask specific questions such as denominational affiliation, levels of religious observance, attitudes toward Israel, etc. For these data, the Jewish community needs to develop its own survey tools.
- 6.
- 7.
As an example in 2010, the low income cut-off for a single-person household in an urban area of 500,000 or more was $22,637(before taxes); in a two-person household, $28,182; in a three-person household, $34,646, etc.
References
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Shahar, C. (2018). Canadian Jewish Population, 2017. In: Dashefsky, A., Sheskin, I. (eds) American Jewish Year Book 2017. American Jewish Year Book, vol 117. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70663-4_6
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