Jewish Surveys of Yesterday: Yom Kippur Absence Method

I referred to the abysmal record of New York Jewish population studies in a previous post. The following excerpt from my dissertation on the Yom Kippur absence method for counting Jewish populations provides the missing context.

The Yom Kippur absence method is perhaps the most original of all proxy measures for estimating the size of the Jewish population. The method used is the essence of simplicity. One simply subtracts the average number of absentees of absentees from the public school system from the number absent on Yom Kippur to estimate the school age Jewish population, and multiplies this estimate by the inverse of the expected proportion of school age children in the Jewish population as a whole. The originator of the Yom Kippur absence method is unclear. Ritterband et al. (1988) noted it was first used in London in 1892 and Philadelphia in 1904, citing an unpublished mimeograph of much later date. Originality, unfortunately, does not result in accuracy. Robison’s (1943a) terse and well reasoned critique ably presents the major problems:

The "Yom Kippur method" makes several assumptions, some of which beg the question. Stated briefly, the reasoning behind this technique for calculating the number of Jews in a large city is that all Jewish children attend public schools and that all Jewish parents keep their children out of school on Yom Kippur. The number of absences from each public school on that day, corrected for the expected number of absences for each school, it is assumed, will equal the number of Jewish children at each school. The proportion that the school children bear to the total population in a census year is the co-efficient by which the number of Jewish children is multiplied to obtain the estimate of the total Jewish population. The validity of this calculation is based on the unproved assumption that the proportion of school children in the Jewish population is identical with that of the school population in the total population. (Robison 1943a:2)

Concerns about the accuracy of the Yom Kippur absence method were far from purely theoretical. Taylor (1943) directly compared the number of Jewish students in the Pittsburgh school system (which apparently recorded students’ religion) to survey data, and found the population was underestimated by 20 percent. This was a product of low birth rates. The estimating system expects a normal age distribution for the Jewish population when in fact the age pyramid is elder-biased (the end of mass migration led to a rapid increase in the age of the Jewish population). In fact, school age children constituted about 15 percent of the Jewish population, compared to 22 percent of the general population. Robison's (1943b) own study of Minneapolis Jewry showed that Jews had much notably lower birth rates than native-born whites, which would lead studies based on the Yom Kippur absence method to underestimate the size of the Jewish population.

In certain circumstances, the Yom Kippur absence method did, however, provide accurate estimates. The American Jewish Year Book estimate of New York City in 1953 was based on this method and estimated that Jews constituted 26.4 percent of the population, while a sample study undertaken by the Health Insurance plan of Greater New York estimated the proportion of Jews at 27 percent (Chenkin 1955). One reason for the more accurate New York estimate was undoubtedly that Jews constituted such a high proportion of New Yorkers that census estimates of the city’s age composition were deeply influenced by the Jewish community. This accurate estimate may, however, have been a fluke. The New York Federation of Jewish Charities used the Yom Kippur absence method with 1957 data and arrived at a much higher estimate of the Jewish population than did the Health Insurance Plan (Chenkin 1960, 1961).

Robison rightly directs attention to the problematic assumptions that all Jewish children were in public schools and that all Jewish children were kept out on Yom Kippur. To the extent that the Yom Kippur absence method was ever effective, its utility depended on the social structure of the first half of twentieth century. With the general lessening of prejudice against Jews after the Second World War, it became increasingly possible for Jews to be enrolled in private schools, especially as more such schools were established without religious affiliation (or became less overtly religious). The so-called Jewish love affair with public schools has also waned, with Orthodox Jews the first group to depart in significant numbers with the establishment of day schools following the Second World War, later picked up by the Conservative movement’s establishment of Solomon Schechter schools, and the more recent establishment of Reform and community day schools. The universality of Yom Kippur observance is also a problematic assumption. Some secularists took particular care to disregard halakhah, Jewish religious law. The famous Grand Yom Kippur Balls of the Lower East Side of New York City that celebrated the new year with "Kol Nidre, music, dancing, buffet; Marseillaise and other hymns" (Goodman 1971:330). While ideological secularism may have been confined to a relatively small proportion of the Jewish population, increasingly large portions of the Jewish community arrived at a more workaday version through a general decline in the salience of Jewish identity, further depressing estimates of Jewish population.

As the most significant set of estimates based on the number of Jewish school children, Linfield's (1928) defense of the method is worth considering. He concedes that the ratio of Jewish children to adults probably differs from that of the population at large:

The ratio of Jewish children to the total number of Jews is probably larger than the ratio of the whole number of children to the total population. These errors would have a tendency to render too large the estimate of the number of Jews arrived at on the basis of this method. On the other hand, it is undoubtedly incorrect to assume that fully 100% of the Jewish children in the large cities are recorded as absent on the day in question. A certain percentage are undoubtedly recorded as "present." From this point of view, the number of Jews arrived at would be too small. Is it not possible that the errors neutralized one another or nearly did so in the fall of 1927? (Linfield 1928:172)

Far from the Jewish community having a higher birth rate than the non-Jewish population, Taylor (1943) and Robison's (1943b) studies of a decade later found precisely the opposite, upsetting Linfield’s precariously balanced offsetting biases. That Linfield saw fit to use the same method 10 years later when its problems were well known is deeply problematic. He was harshly critiqued by the chairman of his own advisory committee (Ritterband et al. 1988), as well as his successors at the American Jewish Year Book, who wrote that:

The national estimates of Jewish population made by the Jewish Statistical Bureau in 1926 and 1936 in conjunction with the decennial Census of Religious Bodies of the United States Census Bureau might have been thought by some lay readers to be sufficient, but demographic experts have found it to be adequate only for purposes of rough calculation. (Seligman and Swados 1949:651)

Considering its glaring flaws, the Yom Kippur absence method was used for an unconscionably long time. Its apex appears to have been around 1927, when Linfield (1928) reports the American Jewish Year Book estimates received from local reporters for New York City, Newark, Boston, Detroit, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Baltimore "checked on the basis of the number of children that abstained from attending school on the Day of Atonement in the fall of 1927" (p. 115). In Cleveland and Pittsburgh the number of Jewish students was estimated by social workers. The only other cities estimated to have 50,000 or more Jews not checked via school records were Baltimore, Chicago, and Los Angeles. The final counts for these cities were apparently leavened with "the number enumerated in the census as persons of foreign birth with Yiddish as their mother-tongue and their children" (p. 118). The manner in which these estimates were combined is not presented. Linfield's estimate is particularly problematic as he took a single day as being representative of the overall level of absenteeism rather than averaging truancy across a longer period. He did not detail the basis by which he extrapolated from the putative population of Jewish children to the total Jewish population other than to refer to it as "the coefficient to the given city," which appeared to assume that Jews had the same age structure as the general population which was deeply problematic and known to be so at the time. The Yom Kippur absence method was used for estimates of larger Jewish communities in conjunction with the 1936 Census of Religious Bodies, a practice that continued throughout the 1950s (Seligman 1950, 1951, 1953). Seligman and Chenkin (1954) used the method to calculate the size of the Jewish population of New York. The final use of the Yom Kippur absence method I am aware of was an estimate of the Jewish population of New York in 1968 (Chenkin 1969). The fact that a method known to be flawed and inaccurate could be used to estimate the size of the largest Jewish community in the world when scientific methods of sampling were well established and had been used for Jewish populations is astonishing and demonstrates a basic disinterest in obtaining accurate data.

References

Chenkin, Alvin. 1955. "Jewish Population of the United States, 1955." Pp. 171-176 in American Jewish Year Book, vol. 56, edited by M. Fine. New York: American Jewish Committee.

Chenkin, Alvin. 1960. "Jewish Population in the United States, 1959." Pp. 3-9 in American Jewish Year Book, vol. 61, edited by M. Fine and M. Himmelfarb. New York: American Jewish Committee.

Chenkin, Alvin. 1961. "Jewish Population in the United States, 1960." Pp. 53-62 in American Jewish Year Book, vol. 62, edited by M. Fine and M. Himmelfarb. New York: American Jewish Committee.

Chenkin, Alvin. 1963. "Jewish Population in the United States, 1962." Pp. 57-76 in American Jewish Year Book, vol. 64, edited by M. Fine and M. Himmelfarb. New York: American Jewish Committee.

Chenkin, Alvin. 1969. "Jewish Population in the United States." Pp. 260-272 in American Jewish Year Book, vol. 70, edited by M. Fine and M. Himmelfarb. New York: American Jewish Committee.

Goodman, Philip. 1971. The Yom Kippur Anthology. Philadelphia, PA: Jewish Publication Society.

Linfield, Harry S. 1928. "Jewish Population in the United States, 1927." Pp. 101-198 in American Jewish Year Book, vol. 30, edited by H. Schneiderman. Philadelphia, PA: Jewish Publication Society of America.

Ritterband, Paul, Barry A. Kosmin, and Jeffrey Scheckner. 1988. "Counting Jewish Populations: Methods and Problems." Pp. 204-211 in American Jewish Year Book, vol. 88, edited by D. Singer. New York: American Jewish Committee.

Robison, Sophia M. 1943a. "Methods of Gathering Data on the Jewish Population." Pp. 10-21 in Jewish Social Studies, vol. 3, edited by S. M. Robison. New York: Conference on Jewish Relations.

Robison, Sophia M. 1943b. "The Jewish Population of Minneapolis, 1936." Pp. 152-159 in Jewish Social Studies, vol. 3, edited by S. M. Robison. New York: Council on Jewish Relations.

Seligman, Ben B. 1950. "The American Jew: Some Demographic Features." Pp. 3-52 in American Jewish Year Book, vol. 51, edited by M. Fine. New York: American Jewish Committee.

Seligman, Ben B. 1951. "Jewish Population Estimates of United States' Communities." Pp. 17-21 in American Jewish Year Book, vol. 52, edited by M. Fine. New York: American Jewish Committee.

Seligman, Ben B. 1953. "Recent Demographic Changes in Some Jewish Communities." Pp. 3-24 in American Jewish Year Book, vol. 54, edited by M. Fine. New York: American Jewish Committee.

Seligman, Ben B. and Alvin Chenkin. 1954. "Jewish Population of the United States, 1953." Pp. 3-7 in American Jewish Year Book, vol. 55, edited by M. Fine. New York: American Jewish Committee.

Seligman, Ben B. and Harvey Swados. 1949. "Jewish Population Studies in the United States." Pp. 651-690 in American Jewish Year Book, vol. 50, edited by H. Schneiderman and M. Fine. Philadelphia, PA: Jewish Publication Society of America.

Taylor, Maurice. 1943. "A Sample Study of the Jewish Population of Pittsburgh, 1938." Pp. 81-108 in Jewish Social Studies, vol. 3, edited by S. M. Robison. New York: Council on Jewish Relations.