1. JEWS BY RELIGION increased in number by just under 2 percent between 2011 and 2021. 2. SECULAR JEWS increased in number by nearly 44 percent during this period. 3. CONVERTED JEWS decreased in number by 18 percent over the decade in question.
the number of Canadian Jews by religion. For example, Ca- nadian haredi women are expected to give birth to 3.5 chil- dren on average. That is an important reason why haredim represent a relatively quickly growing sector of Canadian Jewry, now making up nearly 9 percent of Canada’s Jewish population, including almost 23 percent of the Jewish pop- ulation of metropolitan Montreal. Understanding why the third group, converted Jews, shrank over the same time period is more difficult. We don’t know the expected number of children for convert- ed women who regard themselves as Jewish by ethnicity, culture, or ancestry. However, we do know from the cen- sus that ethnic Jews who convert to a non-Jewish religion exhibit a wide range of social and economic characteristics that closely mirror those of non-Jews. I therefore suspect that the fertility rate of ethnic Jews who have converted to a non-Jewish religion is close to the 1.3 average for all Ca- nadian women. This lower fertility rate likely accounts at least in part for the decline in the number of people in this category of the country’s Jewish population. I also suspect that growing antisemitism may be responsi-
To summarize: the number of ethnic Jews with a reli- gious identity other than Jewish shrank, the number of Jews by religion grew slightly, and the number of ethnic Jews with no religious identification grew considerably. The question is: Why did the size of these three categories change in the ways they did between 2011 and 2021, and what are the im- plications of these changes for Jewish continuity? Canadian Jewish women of child-bearing age are expect- ed to give birth to an average of 1.8 children (high com- pared to Jews in other countries except Israel, where the comparable figure is 3.0). However, some Orthodox and most haredi women of child-bearing age far exceed this number, contributing disproportionately to the increase in
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