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Until the Holocaust, Jews were a significant part of the population of Eastern Europe. Outside Poland, the largest population was in the European part of the USSR, especially Ukraine (1.5 million in the 1930s), but major populations also existed in Hungary, Romania, and Czechoslovakia. Here are lists of some prominent East European Jews, arranged by country of origin.
Alfréd Israel Wetzler, who wrote under the alias Jozef Lánik, was a Slovak Jewish writer. He is known for escaping from Auschwitz concentration camp and co-writing the Vrba-Wetzler Report, which helped halt the deportation of Jews from Hungary, saving up to 200,000 lives.
The Auschwitz Protocols, also known as the Auschwitz Reports, and originally published as The Extermination Camps of Auschwitz and Birkenau, is a collection of three eyewitness accounts from 1943–1944 about the mass murder that was taking place inside the Auschwitz concentration camp in German-occupied Poland during the Second World War. The eyewitness accounts are individually known as the Vrba–Wetzler report, Polish Major's report, and Rosin-Mordowicz report.
Rudolf Vrba was a Slovak-Jewish biochemist who, as a teenager in 1942, was deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp in German-occupied Poland. He escaped from the camp in April 1944, at the height of the Holocaust, and co-wrote the Vrba-Wetzler report, a detailed report about the mass murder taking place there. The report, distributed by George Mantello in Switzerland, is credited with having halted the mass deportation of Hungary's Jews to Auschwitz in July 1944, saving more than 200,000 lives. After the war, Vrba trained as a biochemist, working mostly in England and Canada.
The history of the Jews in Azerbaijan dates back many centuries. Today, Jews in Azerbaijan mainly consist of three distinct groups: Mountain Jews, the most sizable and most ancient group; Ashkenazi Jews, who settled in the area during the late 19th-early 20th centuries, and during World War II; and Georgian Jews who settled mainly in Baku during the early part of the 20th century.
Romanian Jews in Israel refers to the community of Romanian Jews who migrated to Palestine beginning in the later 19th century, continued migrating to Israel after the formation of the modern state in 1948, and live within the state of Israel. The descendants of those who made aliyah in 1930s, the wave of emigrants after World War II or after the fall of communism, with their children and grandchildren born in Israel, represent about 10% of the population. According to the Association of Romanian Journalists Abroad, about 400,000 Romanian Jews live in Israel. They have established several kibbutzim, moshavim and towns. Between 1882 and 1884, Romanian Jews in Israel already established nine localities.
The history of the Jews in Chișinău dates to the early 1700s, when Chișinău was located first in Moldavia and later from 1812 onwards in the Bessarabia region of the Russian Empire. Chișinău is now the capital city of Moldova and is the center of the country's Jewish population. As of 2022, around 10,000 of the 15,000 Moldovan Jews reside in Chișinău.
