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. Shtetls were mainly found in the areas that constituted the 19th-century Pale of Settlement in the Russian Empire, as well as in Congress Poland, Austrian Galicia, the Kingdom of Romania and the Kingdom of Hungary.
The Pale of Settlement was a western region of the Russian Empire with varying borders that existed from 1791 to 1917 in which permanent residency by Jews was allowed and beyond which Jewish residency, permanent or temporary, was mostly forbidden. Most Jews were still excluded from residency in a number of cities within the Pale as well. A few Jews were allowed to live outside the area, including those with university education, the ennobled, members of the most affluent of the merchant guilds and particular artisans, some military personnel and some services associated with them, including their families, and sometimes their servants. Pale is an archaic term meaning an enclosed area.
Itzik Feffer, also Fefer was a Soviet Yiddish poet executed on the Night of the Murdered Poets during Joseph Stalin's late purges.
Cantonists were underage sons of conscripts in the Russian Empire. From 1721 on they were educated in special "cantonist schools" for future military service. The cantonist schools and the cantonist system were eventually abolished in 1857, following public and international criticism and the Russian defeat in the Crimean War.
The Kievan Letter, or Kyivan letter is an early 10th-century letter thought to be written by representatives of the Jewish community in Kiev. The letter, a Hebrew-language recommendation written on behalf of one member of their community, was part of an enormous collection brought to Cambridge by Solomon Schechter from the Cairo Geniza. It was discovered in 1962 during a survey of the Geniza documents by Norman Golb of the University of Chicago. The letter is dated by most scholars to around 930 CE. Some think that the letter dates from a time when Khazars were no longer a dominant force in the politics of the city. According to Marcel Erdal, the letter does not come from Kiev but was sent to Kiev.
Norman Golb was a scholar of Jewish history and the Ludwig Rosenberger Professor in Jewish History and Civilization at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago.
The history of the Jews in Ukraine dates back over a thousand years; Jewish communities have existed in the modern territory of Ukraine from the time of the Kievan Rus'. Important Jewish religious and cultural movements, from Hasidism to Zionism, arose there. According to the World Jewish Congress, the Jewish community in Ukraine constitutes Europe's third-largest and the world's fifth-largest.
Rachel Elior is an Israeli professor of Jewish philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Jerusalem, Israel. Her principal subjects of research has been Hasidism and the history of early Jewish mysticism.
The Blank family in the Russian Empire was the family of the maternal grandfather of Vladimir Lenin.
Joanna Beata Michlic is a Polish social and cultural historian specializing in Polish-Jewish history and the Holocaust in Poland. An honorary senior research associate at the Centre for Collective Violence, Holocaust and Genocide Studies at University College London (UCL), she focuses in particular on the collective memory of traumatic events, particularly as it relates to gender and childhood.
A miasteczko (Polish:[mjaˈstɛtʂkɔ] or miestelis, was a historical type of urban settlement similar to a market town in the former Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. After the partitions of Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth at the end of the 18th-century, these settlements became widespread in the Austrian, German and Russian Empires. The vast majority of miasteczkos had significant or even predominant Jewish populations; these are known in English under the Yiddish term shtetl. Miasteczkos had a special administrative status other than that of town or city.
The Holocaust in Ukraine was the systematic mass murder of Jews in the Reichskommissariat Ukraine, the General Government, the Crimean General Government and some areas which were located to the East of Reichskommissariat Ukraine, in the Transnistria Governorate and Bessarabia, Northern Bukovina and the Hertsa region and Carpathian Ruthenia during World War II. The listed areas are currently parts of Ukraine.
Two Hundred Years Together is a two-volume historical essay by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. It was written as a comprehensive history of Jews in the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union and modern Russia between the years 1795 and 1995, especially with regard to government attitudes toward Jews.
Ivan Yulianovych Kulyk was a Ukrainian poet, writer, translator, diplomat and Communist Party activist. He also wrote under the names "R. Rolinato" and "Vasyl Rolenko".
The 2020 estimate of the Jewish population in metropolitan Chicago is around 319,600, according to Brandeis University's Chicago Report. The population of Jewish people within the City of Chicago's limits is estimated to be around 120,000, with another 200,000 residing in the suburbs surrounding the major city. At the end of the 20th century there were a total of 270,000 Jews in the Chicago area, with 30% in the city limits. In 1995, over 80% of the suburban Jewish population lived in the northern and northwestern suburbs of Chicago. At this time, West Rogers Park was - and continues to be - the largest Jewish community within the city of Chicago. Over time, the Jewish population within the city has declined and today tends to be older and more well-educated than the Chicago average; however, recent decades have seen a resurgence in urban Chicago's Jewish population, particularly beyond the boundaries of traditional Jewish neighborhoods. The Jewish immigrants to Chicago came from many different countries, with the most common being Eastern Europe and Germany.
Katja Petrowskaja is a Kyiv born German prose writer and journalist.
Jarrod Tanny is a Canadian American professor of history and Charles and Hannah Block Distinguished Scholar in Jewish History at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. After completing his education through a master's degree in Canada, he came to the United States (US) for a PhD in history at the University of California at Berkeley. He has made his academic career in the US.
Volodymyr Pavlovych Stakhiv was a Ukrainian nationalist politician and journalist who was a member of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, serving as Minister of Foreign Affairs in the Ukrainian national government. He was the brother of Yevhen Stakhiv.
Hryts’ko Kernerenko was a Jewish-Ukrainian poet. He may have been the first poet of Jewish descent to write in Ukrainian, and was the first to write on the topic of Jewish-Ukrainian identity.
