Page "History of Israel" Paragraph 86

Between 1939 and 1945, approximately 6 million Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe were murdered.

Almost a quarter of those killed were children.

The Holocaust had an overwhelmingly decisive impact on the Jewish world ( and beyond ).

The Polish and German Jewish communities, which had played such an important role in defining the pre-1945 Jewish world, now virtually ceased to exist.

In the United States and Palestine, Jews of European origin became disconnected from their families and roots.

Sephardi Jews, who had been a minority, became a much more significant factor in the Jewish world.

The Second World War left the surviving remnant of Jews in central Europe as displaced persons ( refugees ); an Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, established to examine the Palestine issue, surveyed their ambitions and found that 97 % wanted to migrate to Palestine.