Belgorod-Dniestrosvki, which means literaly “white city on the Dniestr, is a quiet city, located about a hundred kilometers south to Odessa. It was founded in the sixth century BC by Grec settlers from the city of Milet, Belgorod is actually one of the oldest city in the world. Its strategic location on the Dniestr delta made it a stronghold for the empires and kingdoms which controlled ...
Plus d'infosContenus associés au mot-clé “hasidism”
Lvov
Lvov -Lviv in Ukrainian, Lwów in Polish, Lemberg in German, Léopold in French- a city long Polish, then Austro-Hungarian, was again Polish between the wars. Annexed in 1939 by the Soviet Union after the German-Soviet nonaggression pact, it was occupied from 1941 to 1944 by Nazi Germany, taken back by the Soviets after the Second World War, and later reattached to Ukraine. The Jewish community ...
Plus d'infosUkraine
Ukraine, the largest of the former Soviet Republics, is, along with Belarus and Lithuania, heir to the former "Pale of Settlement", the buffer zone designed t contain the Jews within the westernmost margins of the Russian Empire. Despite considerable losses due to the Shoah and resulting emigration, Ukraine still contains a large Jewish community (around 500000 members, or 1% of the ...
Plus d'infosSighet Marmatiei
At the northern border of Transylvania lies Sighet Marmatiei, unquestionably the region’s most original and charming little city, where Romanian, Hungarian, Roma and Ruthenian populations all coexist. Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel was born in this Hasidic township. Jews settled in this town, located in the region of Maramures, in the 17th century. The Jewish population grew from ...
Plus d'infosSzczebrzeszyn
A jewish community sprang up in Szczebrzeszyn in the sixteenth century, while the synagogue was built here in the seventeenth century. In the nineteenth century, the community experienced important growth, jumping from 1083 members (31% of the population) in 1827 to 2450 (44%) in 1897; it also became a center of Hasidic influence centered around the tsadik Elimelech Hurwitz. Before the war, ...
Plus d'infosLublin
An important city in eastern Poland, Lublin has preserved a very picturesque old quarter that offers a glimpse of what life was like here in the seventeenth century, with a city hall in the middle of the rynek, a Dominican church, fortifications, and various city gates. Lublin also features a castle surrounded by a park plucked straight out of a tale from The Thousand and One Nights. The ...
Plus d'infosRymanów
Jews settled in Rymanów so long ago that there exists no document mentioning their arrival. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the inhabitants of the city lived mainly from the cultivation of the vines and the wine trade, activity in which the Jewish community held a preponderant place. In 1765, a thousand Jews lived in Rymanów, or 43% of the population. In the eighteenth century, ...
Plus d'infosLithuania
The Jewish community of Lithuania numbers only some 6000. People It is no more than a shadow of what it once was: until the Shoah, it was a center of the Yiddish-speaking lands. In a sense, everything began here from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries when European Judaism's center of gravity shifted from Germany and France to Poland and Belarus. As a reaction to the pietisitic practices ...
Plus d'infosBelarus
The Republic of Belarus is a state formed of the disintegration of the Soviet Union. It has retained, however, close ties to Moscow. Historically, Belarus belonged to Lithuania in the fourteenth century, Poland in the fifteenth, and later the Russian Empire in the late eighteenth century. From 1920 to 1939, its western regions (including Grodno and Brest-Litovsk) were integrated within ...
Plus d'infosYiddishland
The visitor to Eastern Europe hoping to discover a rich Jewish architectural heritage must remember that what was once the center of Judaic cultural and religious life in Europe -principally in Lithuania between the eighteenth century and the Shoah- had disappeared beyond ruins and cemeteries. The complete eradication of a Jewish presence, the sworn objective of the Nazis, was conducted with ...
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