As of August 2023, around 245,000 Holocaust survivors are thought to be alive around the world. According to data published by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, or Claims Conference, most of them were born between 1933 and 1942, which made them toddlers, school-age children or young adolescents when the Second World War ended in 1945. As our chart shows, many of the still-living survivors of the Holocaust currently live in Israel.
Around 119,300 individuals, or 48.8 percent of the total, reside in the West Asian state. Most of these individuals self-reported being born in the former Soviet Union and North African countries like Libya, Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. North America, in this case the United States and Canada, boasts an even higher percentage of survivors from the former territory of the Soviet Union, with 72.6 percent of the roughly 44,200 individuals residing in both countries being born in modern-day Russia or post-Soviet states. Overall, 47 percent of survivors claimed the USSR as their birth country. The survivor population of Israel, the United States, France, Russia and Germany alone makes up roughly 87 percent of all still-living Holocaust survivors.
While the Claims Conference purports to have consulted a variety of sources mostly tied to restitution payments either administered by the Conference itself or by national programs like the BEG in Germany, the actual number of survivors might be up to ten percent higher, according to the report.
The Claims Conference itself hasn't been immune to criticism in the past. Journalists, members of other Jewish organizations and, at one point, their treasurer Roman Kent have criticized the marginal payouts to Holocaust survivors, the size of the paychecks of its top officials, as well as the organization's bureaucratization and inefficiency. Semen Domnitser, a program director for the Claims Conference from 1999 to 2010, was sentenced by a U.S. federal court to eight years in prison for embezzling $57 million from the organization in 2013. This fraud was achieved via a network of individuals forging identification documents, the basis for whether applicants are granted restitution payments through funds administered by the Claims Conference.
