ABSTRACT
It was all too hopeful to think that Europe’s New Order might be one free of anti-Semitism. In many ways, though, the conditions have never appeared so favorable. For one, there are few Jews left in most of Europe. In Germany, Austria, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, as well as the Balkans and the Baltics, Hitler’s Final Solution policies decimated the thriving Jewish communities that had composed nearly half of the world’s Jewry. In the East bloc, most of those who escaped the Holocaust later fled the hostile “anti-Zionist” campaigns of the communist states. Of the five million Jews who lived in non-Soviet Central and Eastern Europe on the eve of WWII, only 700,000 survived to see the war’s end. Today just over 125,000 Jews remain in their ancestors’ homes. Only Russia (with nearly two million) and Hungary (about 80,000) still have significant Jewish populations.
