Shtetl

Shtetl or shtetel is a Yiddish term for small towns with predominantly Ashkenazi Jewish populations which existed in Eastern Europe before the Holocaust. The term is used in the context of former East European Jewish societies as mandated islands within the surrounding non-Jewish populace, and thus bears certain connotations of discrimination.^[1] Shtetls (or shtetels, shtetlach, shtetelach or shtetlekh)^[2][3][4] were mainly found in the areas that constituted the 19th-century Pale of Settlement in the Russian Empire (constituting modern-day Belarus, Lithuania, Moldova, Ukraine, Poland, Latvia and Russia), as well as in Congress Poland, Austrian Galicia, the Kingdom of Romania and the Kingdom of Hungary.^[1]

In Yiddish, a larger city, like Lviv or Chernivtsi, is called a shtot (Yiddish: שטאָט), and a village is called a dorf (Yiddish: דאָרף).^[5] Shtetl is a diminutive of shtot with the meaning 'little town'. Despite the existence of Jewish self-administration (kehilla/kahal), officially there were no separate Jewish municipalities, and the shtetl was referred to as a miasteczko (or mestechko, in Russian bureaucracy), a type of settlement which originated in the former Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and was formally recognized in the Russian Empire as well. For clarification, the expression "Jewish miasteczko" was often used.^[6][7]

The shtetl as a phenomenon of Ashkenazi Jews in Eastern Europe was destroyed by the Nazis during the Holocaust.^[8] The term is sometimes used to describe largely Jewish communities in the United States, such as existed on the Lower East Side of New York City in the early 20th century, and predominantly Hasidic communities such as Kiryas Joel and New Square today.