Instruct: Given a question, retrieve relevant passages that answer the question.
Query: What percentage of the Iranian population is Jewish?
Iran's Jewish community is officially recognized as a religious minority group by the government, and, like the Zoroastrians and Christians, they are allocated one seat in the Iranian Parliament. Siamak Moreh Sedgh is the current Jewish member of the parliament, replacing Maurice Motamed in the 2008 election. In 2000, former Jewish MP Manuchehr Eliasi estimated that at that time there were still 60,000–85,000 Jews in Iran; most other sources put the figure at 25,000.[67] As of 2018, only 8,500 Jews still live in Iran[68] and they constitute 0,01% of Iranian population, a number confirmed by Sergio DellaPergola, a leading Jewish demographer.[69]
The 2011 Forbes' list of billionaires in the world listed 24 Canadian billionaires. Among the billionaires listed, 6 out of the 24 or 25% of the Canadian billionaires listed are Jewish (25 times the percentage of Jews in the Canadian population). Sol Encel and Leslie Stein, authors of "Continuity, Commitment, and Survival: Jewish communities in the diaspora" cite 14% of the top 50 richest Canadians are Jewish (14 times the percentage) as have been 31% of Canada's thirty wealthiest families (31 times the percentage), and while constituting only 1.0 percent of the Canadian population, they comprise 8% of the top executives of Canada's most largest and profitable companies.Notes
New Albany has a sizable Jewish population as a percentage of total population, second only to Bexley in central Ohio. New Albany is home to Temple Beth Shalom, the Columbus Jewish Day School, the Chabad Center for a Jewish Tomorrow, and central Ohio's newest Jewish Community Center.
Birmingham's percentage of Christians is below the national, regional and county average. The percentage of Muslims in Birmingham is above the national, regional and county average, as are the Buddhist (0.3%) and Hindu (1.98%) percentages. The Sikh percentage, 2.93%, is higher than the national and regional percentage, yet below the county figure. The percentage of Jewish population in Birmingham (0.24%) is higher than the regional and county average yet almost half that of the national average.
Iran's Jewish population was reduced from 100,000–150,000 in 1948 to about 80,000 immediately before the Iranian Revolution, due mostly to immigration to Israel. While immigration to Israel had slowed in the 1970s and the Jewish population of Iran had stabilized, the majority of Iran's remaining Jews left the country in the aftermath of the overthrow of the Shah. In the 2000s, the Jewish population of Iran was estimated by most sources to be 25,000,[53][54][55][56] (sources date from 2006, 2007, 2008, and 2006, respectively) though estimates varied, with some as low as 17,000 by 2010[100] and as high as 40,000 in 1998.[101] However, the official census in August 2012 indicated that there were only 8,756 Jews still living in Iran.[59] Notable population centers include Tehran, Isfahan (1,200),[102] and Shiraz. Historically, Jews maintained a presence in many more Iranian cities. Jews are protected in the Iranian constitution and allowed one seat in the Majlis.[54] After Israel, it is home to the second-largest Jewish population in the Middle East.[53]
Despite the rapid grow of the Jewish population since 1967, its relative size has decreased due to a higher growth rate among the Arab population. The Jewish percentage of the population dropped from 74% in 1967 to 66% in 2005. Researchers at the Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies called this ""a contradiction between the reality in Jerusalem and the declared government policy of maintaining the Jewish majority in Jerusalem since the city's re-unification"". To reverse this trend, they suggested expanding Jerusalem's border to the west (meaning the addition of Jewish population centres), or removing Arab neighborhoods from the city's municipal area.
Based on findings from the 2011 census and their own research, The Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation at Monash University estimates that the suburb has 5,005 Jewish residents, comprising 44.4% of the suburb's population. Results from the 2016 census indicated a Jewish population of 4,008, a percentage of 33.9.
Some sources put the Iranian Jewish population in the mid- and late 1980s as between 50,000–60,000. An estimate based on the 1986 census put the figure for the same time period, at approximately 55,000. For the 1990s there has been more uniformity in the figures, with most sources since then estimating roughly 25,000 Jews remaining in Iran.
Many Iranian Jews chose to immigrate to the United States and have built large communities in Los Angeles, Miami, Texas, and New York. According to the 2010 Foreign Born Population Survey, an estimated 100,000 Iranian Jews are currently living in Los Angeles alone. At first, Iranian Jews did not receive a warm welcome from the other Jewish groups living in the United States. Most of these Jews are Ashkenazi, while Iranian Jews are Sephardic, and they do not share the same culture or some of the same tradition. These new Iranian Jewish communities in the United States have thrived and have become great centers of Jewish learning and study for all Jews. The Iranian Jewish communities in the United States have kept many of their traditions alive through the teaching of Sephardic Jewish customs in schools and synagogues across the United States. Iranian Jews living in the United States have also helped to bring other Jews from Iran and other parts of the world into the United States so they can escape religious persecution and harassment as well. 
In December 2007, Jerusalem had a population of 747,600—64% were Jewish, 32% Muslim, and 2% Christian. At the end of 2005, the population density was . According to a study published in 2000, the percentage of Jews in the city's population had been decreasing; this was attributed to a higher Muslim birth rate, and Jewish residents leaving. The study also found that about nine percent of the Old City's 32,488 people were Jews. Of the Jewish population, 200,000 live in East Jerusalem settlements which are considered illegal under international law.
Iranians are predominantly Shia Muslims. A number of Iranians have converted to Christianity in the diaspora from the predominant Shia Islam. While this group accounts for rather a small percentage of the total diaspora population, it is now far from marginal, with dozens of Iranian churches existing throughout countries with significant Iranian communities, including the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Sweden, and Germany. There also notable groups of Baha'i, Jewish, and Zoroastrian Iranians.
According to the 2002 results of the National Jewish Population Survey, there were 12,600 Jews in Livingston, approximately 46% of the population, one of the highest percentages of Jews in any American municipality. The neighboring towns of South Orange and Millburn also have high Jewish populations.
The Iranian government did not support the antisemitism of Nazis. Iran argued that Iranians including its Jewish population, which was the largest in the Middle East, were immune to the racial Nuremberg Laws on the grounds that they were of Aryan descent. Iranian embassies in occupied European capitals by Germans rescued over 1,500 Jews and secretly granted them Iranian citizenship, allowing them to move to Iran.
Kings Point, a village constituting part of Great Neck, has the greatest percentage of Iranians in the United States (approximately 40%).[110] Unlike the Iranian community in Los Angeles, which contains a large number of non-Jewish Iranians, the Iranian population in and around Great Neck is almost entirely Jewish.
Some Baltimoreans of Dutch descent have been Dutch Jews. Dutch Jews first began to immigrate during the 1830s and 1840s. By 1850, only 2% of Baltimore's Jewish population was Dutch. Only four Dutch Jewish families and twenty-one Dutch Jewish families immigrated during the 1860s and 1870s, respectively. Although the Dutch Jewish population was small, it comprised a large portion of the city's Dutch population. In 1850, 49% of Dutch-born Baltimoreans were Jewish. However, the population of Dutch Catholics increased as they found the city to be becoming more hospitable, and so the percentage of Dutch Jews declined. By 1860, only 17% of the Dutch-born were Jewish. One-third of the Dutch Jews lived in Ward 10 in 1860 and in Ward 5 in 1870.
The 40 most diverse Census tracts in the Boston CSA:
The 40 census tracts in the Boston CSA with the highest percentage of residents who identify as Hispanic or Latino:
Census tracts in the Boston CSA with the highest percentage of residents who identify as Black American:
Census tracts in the Boston CSA with the highest percentage of residents who identify as Asian American:
Census tracts in the Boston CSA with the highest percentage of residents who identify as Irish American:
Census tracts in the Boston CSA with the highest percentage of residents who identify as Italian American:
Census tracts in the Boston CSA with the highest percentage of residents who identify as Portuguese American:
Census tracts in the Boston CSA with French or French Canadian listed as first ancestry:
Greater Boston has a sizable Jewish community, estimated at between 210,000 people, and 261,000 or 5–6% of the Greater Boston metro population, compared with about 2% for the nation as a whole. Contrary to national trends, the number of Jews in Greater Boston has been growing, fueled by the fact that 60% of children in Jewish mixed-faith families are raised Jewish, compared with roughly one in three nationally.
There are religious and ethnolinguistic differences among the Muslim, Jewish, Baha'i, Zoroastrian, Christian, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Kurdish, and Assyrian groups. Calculating the percentage of Christian Iranian-Americans is difficult because most Iranian Christians are of Armenian or Assyrian origin; and, apart from identifying as Iranian, a number amongst them also strongly self-identifies as Armenian or Assyrian, rather than as (or apart from) Iranian.
In order to fight the growing racial antisemitism among the Iranian population, many Jews joined the Tudeh party and advocated for communism. Even though Jews comprised less than 2 percent of Iranian population, almost fifty percent of the members of the Tudeh party were Jewish. Tudeh party was the only party among the Iranian political parties that accepted Jews with open arms. Most writers for publications of the Tudeh party were Jewish. Furthermore, many Iranian Jews viewed communism as a Jewish movement since many leading members of the communist revolution in Russia were Jewish and were looked upon favorably by Persian Jews.
A Jewish community existed in Grajewo from the late 18th century. At times, Jews formed a majority of the town population. In 1808, 197 Jews live in the town, 39% of the total population. In 1827 they made up a majority, with 57% of the population. In 1857 the percentage rose to 76% and in 1897 over 4,000 Jews lived in the town. Following the First World War, the Jewish population fell sharply. In 1921, 2,834 Jews lived in the town, 39% of the population.
Skokie was originally a German-Luxembourger farming community, but was later settled by a sizeable Jewish population, especially after World War II. At its peak in the mid-1960s, 58% of the population was Jewish, the largest percentage of any Chicago suburb. In recent years, several synagogues and Jewish schools have closed. However, Skokie still has a very large Jewish population and an active Chabad. It is home to the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center, which opened in northwest Skokie in 2009.
Half of the nation's Iranians reside in the state of California alone. Other large communities include New York/New Jersey, which have 9.1% of the U.S.'s Iranian population, followed by Washington, D.C./Maryland/Virginia (8.3%) and Texas (6.7%). Kings Point, New York, a village in Great Neck, New York, is said to have the largest concentration of Iranians in the United States (approximately 40%). However, unlike the population in Los Angeles, the Great Neck population is almost exclusively Jewish.
Moreover, DNA tests have demonstrated substantially less inter-marriage in most of the various Jewish ethnic divisions over the last 3,000 years than in other populations. The findings lend support to traditional Jewish accounts accrediting their founding to exiled Israelite populations, and counters theories that many or most of the world's Jewish populations were founded by entirely gentile populations that adopted the Jewish faith, as in the notable case of the historic Khazars. Although groups such as the Khazars could have been absorbed into modern Jewish populations — in the Khazars' case, absorbed into the Ashkenazim — it is unlikely that they formed a large percentage of the ancestors of modern Ashkenazi Jews, and much less that they were the genesis of the Ashkenazim.
The largest religious community are Persian Jews, who make up 26% of the population of Beverly Hills. The Iranian Jewish community in Beverly Hills, numbering over 8,000, is the second largest Iranian Jewish community in the United States, after Great Neck, New York.
A spike in anti-Jewish sentiment occurred after the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 and continued until 1953 due to the weakening of the central government and strengthening of the clergy in the course of political struggles between the Shah and Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh. Mossadegh himself although viewed the establishment of the state of Israel as a form of colonialism, had good relationship with the Jewish community. On his trip to United States, a Jewish journalist, Raby Moshfegh Hamadani, was accompanying him and giving advice. The most prominent anti-Israeli member of the government was Hossein Fatemi. Hossein Fatemi closed the office of the Jewish Agency on Israel's independence day in 1953. He also annulled an agreement permitting Israeli El Al airplanes to land in Iran. Fatemi from time to time published semi official documents hinting that Iran no longer recognizes the state of Israel. However Mossadegh himself continued commercial ties with the state of Israel and allowed the negotiations between the Bank Melli and Bank Leumi in Israel to continue.
Eliz Sanasarian estimates that in 1948–1953, about one-third of Iranian Jews, most of them poor, emigrated to Israel. David Littman puts the total figure of emigrants to Israel in 1948-1978 at 70,000.
From the beginning of the 20th century, the literacy rate among the Jewish minority was significantly higher than the Muslim masses. In 1945 about 80 percent of the Jewish population were literate, whereas most Muslims could not read and write. In 1968 only 30 percent of Muslims were literate, whereas this figure was more than 80 percent for the Jews.
The Six-Day War between Arabs and Israel in 1967 created a tense environment for Persian Jewry. During this time, the synagogues in Shiraz remained closed for more than ten weeks until Tisha B'Av for fear of attacks from Muslims masses. Jewish sources report that many gentiles tried to invade the Jewish ghetto and were dispersed by the police.
The reign of shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi after the deposition of Mossadegh in 1953, was the most prosperous era for the Jews of Iran. In the 1970s, only 10 percent of Iranian Jews were classified as impoverished; 80 percent were middle class and 10 percent wealthy. Although Jews accounted for only a small percentage of Iran's population, in 1979 two of the 18 members of the Iranian Academy of Sciences, 80 of the 4,000 university lecturers, and 600 of the 10,000 physicians in Iran were Jews. An important factor in economic improvement of the Jews was close relations between the Shah and the state of Israel. Details of this connection and how the condition of Iranian Jews improved dramatically in a few short years still awaits rigorous exploration.
A 2012 national telephone survey of a sample of 400 Iranian-Americans, commissioned by the Public Affairs Alliance of Iranian Americans and conducted by Zogby Research Services, asked the respondents what their religions were. The responses broke down as follows: Muslim 31%, atheist/realist/humanist 11%, agnostic 8%, Baha’i 7%, Jewish 5%, Protestant 5%, Roman Catholic 2%, Zoroastrian 2%, "Other" 15%, and "No response" 15%. The survey had a cooperation rate of 31.2%. The margin of error for the results was +/- 5 percentage points, with higher margins of error for sub-groups. Notably, the number of Muslims decreased from 42% in 2008 to 31% in 2012.
The city of Khotyn is located in the Chernivtsi oblast of Ukraine. According to the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the town was almost entirely Jewish or Russian. This created a uniformity of culture that endured throughout the different occupations of Khotyn (Bessarabia in the late 1800s, Austria during the 1910s, the Soviet Army in June 1940, Romania in 1941, and the USSR in 1944). The town in 1930 was composed of 38% Jews, and roughly the same percentage of Russians and Ukrainians. However, after the 2nd World War, the Jewish percentage of the population fell to 8%. The current Jewish population of Khotyn is small; residents estimate the community at 10 people, and the U.S. Commission for the Preservation of America's Heritage Abroad estimates the population at 11-100.