Shtetl Shtetl Simon Posford Category="Human geography"Category="Jewish history"Category="Yiddish"A shtetl or shtetele, Yiddish: לטעטש, derived from German: städtlein, meaning "little town/city") was typically a small Town or Village with a large Jewish population in pre-Holocaust Central and Eastern Europe. Shtetls (Yiddish Plural: shtetlach) were mainly found in the areas which constituted the 19th century Pale of Settlement in the Russian Empire, the Congress Kingdom of Poland, Galicia, and Romania. A larger City, like Lemberg or Czernowitz, was called a shtot, German: stadt, Yiddish: טָאטש. [image] [image] [image] [image]

History

History of the oldest Eastern European shtetls began about a millennium ago and saw periods of relative tolerance and prosperity as well as times of extreme poverty, hardships and pogroms.

The May Laws introduced by Tsar Alexander III of Russia in 1882 banned Jews from rural areas and towns of less than ten thousand people. In the 20th century revolutions, civil wars, industrialization and the Holocaust destroyed traditional shtetl existence.

Famous communities

Traditional names are given, with present-day names and localisations in parentheses.

Shtots

Shtetls

Fictional

The most famous fictional shtetl is Chelm, the legendary town of fools. Kasrilevke, the setting of many of Sholom Aleichem's stories, and Anatevka, the setting of the musical Fiddler on the Roof (based on other stories of Sholom Aleichem) are other notable fictional shtetls.

The 2002 novel Everything Is Illuminated, by Jonathan Safran Foer, tells a fictional story set in the Ukrainian shtetl Trachimbrod.

See also

External links