[3] Communal leaders, such as Rabbi Ephraim Buchwald of the National Jewish Outreach Program, popularized the phrase.
[4][5] The word silent is meant to evoke a state of shock due to the fact that millions of Jews are freely choosing to leave Judaism.
For some, the loss of millions of Jewish coreligionists is deemed serious enough to be called a holocaust (meaning a "wholesale sacrifice or destruction".
Since World War II, assimilation has been the leading cause of Jewish population decline in Western countries.
[3] According to the 2000—2001 National Jewish Population Survey, from 1996, 47% of American Jews married a non-Jew.