shtetl

Shtetlech (, shtetl (singular), שטעטלעך, Shtetlech (plural)) were small towns with large Jewish populations which existed in Central and Eastern Europe before the Holocaust. Shtetlech 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. In Yiddish, a larger city, like Lwów (Lviv) or Czernowice (Chernivtsi), was called a shtot (, ); a village was called a dorf . Non Jews referred to the shtetl as Mestechko (Russian местечко, Polish miasteczko).