Planning institute director general Avinoam Bar-Yosef presented the research group's annual report on "the situation of the Jewish people" to the Knesset Immigration and Absorption Committee on Monday. The institute, which is partly funded by the Jewish Agency, concluded that the State of Israel is the single guarantee of the Jewish people's continued existence. Bar-Yosef will submit the report to the government next week.

Today about 5.28 million Jews live in the U.S., with 5.235 million living in Israel.

The report projects how many Jews there will be in 2020. Israel is the only country in the world expected to see significant growth in the size of its Jewish population, while all other communities in the world are expected to shrink or remain stable. The overall number of Jews in the world is expected to rise by half a million people.

The Jerusalem-based institute predicts that there will be 6.25 million Jews in Israel in 2020, compared to 5.25 million Jews today. In North America the number of Jews is expected to remain stable, at about 5.5 million. The number of Jews in Europe is expected to drop from 1.25 million to 1 million. In the former Soviet Union, the number of Jews is expected to shrink from 380,000 to 180,000.

The rate of assimilation is expected to be slightly less than 50 percent in the U.S., 60 percent in Germany and Hungary, and 80 percent in the former Soviet Union.