Przecław
Portion of Pshetzlov Market Square, 1912 (my father was 1 year-old) We’ve visited 6 communities where shtetls existed before the Holocaust wiped out everything, and are staying in Kazimierz, the old Jewish part of Krakow, itself virtually also a former shtetl (shtetl is the Yiddish word for town; plural, shtetlekh). One of the towns we visit is Przecław where my father was raised until leaving for America at the age of 18 in 1929. Those we visited are a tiny sample of the close to 2,000 that existed in the former Polish Commonwealth (including Lithuania, Belarus and parts of Ukraine). The shtetls (small towns with a significant Jewish community living along with Catholic Poles) were ubiquitous and formed a closely connected and interwoven web of Jewishness in Poland. As we travel the countryside, it is amazing that every 10 or so miles another shtetl existed, that they each represented or embodied a vibrant Jewish life, religion, and culture, and that they were often...