Mark Tolts

Mark Tolts is a Senior Research Associate (ret.) in the Division of Jewish Demography and Statistics at the Avraham Harman Research Institute of Contemporary Jewry of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. A leading authority on the demography of Jews of the former USSR, Dr. Tolts is also an Associate Fellow at the Institute for Jewish Policy Research, London. He has written widely on the demography of the former Soviet Union, and on Soviet and post-Soviet Jewry in particular. Mark was born in Molotov (now Perm, Russia). He had unusual luck for a Jewish child in the Soviet Union to receive some Jewish education from his family: his father was formerly a Polish citizen who had matriculated in a Hebrew gymnasium. Mark graduated from Perm University. For several years, he was a high-ranking official in the Perm Branch of the Russian Statistical Administration. This gave him an excellent background in Soviet statistics. He received his Ph.D. in statistics at the Institute of Statistics, USSR Central Statistical Administration, Moscow. Following his move to Moscow, he was affiliated with the Institute for Socioeconomic Studies of Population, USSR Academy of Sciences. At the time of perestroika, Dr. Tolts was an active contributor on demographic topics to the liberal press (i.e. Ogonek and others) and a member of the USSR government-appointed team of experts for evaluation of the Soviet population losses during World War II. Since 1991, Mark Tolts has been living in Israel. Some of his more recent articles have been devoted to the contribution of Jewish émigré scholars who originated from Russia to Western demography. His treatise on “Population and Migration since World War I” appears in The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe.