On the Issue of Causes of Death among Jews

Israel Koralnik was born in 1901 in Uman, Ukraine and studied economics and statistics in Berlin. In 1919 he became director of ORT’s Department of Statistics, for which he compiled a report in Yiddish on Jewish refugees and victims of pogroms in Ukraine, based on data from the 1917 census. In 1921 he cofounded the first Yiddish statistics magazine, and then became director of the Information Department of the Central Organization for Jewish Immigration, known as Hicem, and later of the Statistics Department of the Central Organization for the Protection of Jewish Health. He served as assistant to the Jewish statistician Jakob Lestchinsky, and in 1929 he became editor of a journal on Jewish demography and statistics. He moved to Paris in 1933, serving as secretary-general of the ORT union. During World War II, Koralnik and his family crossed into Switzerland, where they were placed in refugee camps. He settled in Geneva in 1945.