Good things come in small packages

Dear Editor, There was a major statistical error in Mary Kenny’s piece on the rise of strictly Orthodox Jews in Britain (IC 22/10/2015). The UK Jewish community is just under 0.5% of the total population not the 5% she quoted. This amounts to a community of just under 300,000 out of a total UK population of over 60,000,000. Good things come in small packages. 

Yours etc.,

Dr Yaakov Wise,

Manchester, England.

Mary Kenny replies: I did, indeed, get the decimal point wrong in that statistic and am glad to stand corrected. However, the main point about fertility remains: religious Jews are much more likely to have larger families, with seven children per woman among the Ultra-Orthodox, than the secularised Jewish community.