A New York-based ultra-Orthodox rabbi who has posted thousands of popular outreach lectures online said in a lecture on Tuesday only about 1 million halachic Jews, meaning people born of a Jewish mother, perished in the Holocaust.
In a on his YouTube channel filmed at a lecture in Queens, New York, Rabbi Yosef Mizrachi cited high assimilation rates in Europe before World War II to make his claim that 80 percent of those identified as Jews killed by the Nazis during the Holocaust were not Jewish according to halakha, or Jewish law.
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“If you look at the percent of assimilation that there was in Europe, which already reached 80 percent, it’s reasonable to assume that 80 percent of the 6 million were not Jews, ” said Mizrachi, who teaches at a yeshiva in Monsey.
“The truth is that not even 1 million Jews were killed. Not that this is, God forbid, an insignificant number, it’s massive, but there is a difference between 1 million and 6 million.”
“To the non-Jews, everyone who has a little bit of Jewish blood is Jewish, ” Mizrachi explained. “For example, according to secular law, Howard Stern, the impure, despicable man, is a Jew.”
