Russian Jews
To Russian Jews, the synagogue was the center of religion and religion was the most important thing in their lives. The rabbi was their leader, they came to him with every problem they had. Jews were poor, but they all gave tzedakah. It was said that even the poorest Jews could find someone poorer to help and give money to. According to the Jewish religion, tzedakah is one of the most important mitzvahs you can do. The same could be said about the Jewish holidays. They were observed very strictly, but Shabbat was the most welcomed.
In order to teach the importance of Jewish law, they started their own schools, their own courts of law, and their own burial societies. even though there were pogroms, religious persecution forced the Jews to create stronger communities and made them more united.
In the beginning of the 1800s, Alexander I ruled Russia. He promised the Jews that they could become farmers, could live in two districts, and could buy unoccupied land. Although Alexander was kind and helped the Jews, the tax they were forced to pay, stayed. before he died in 1825, the Jewish situation became hard for them to bare. They lived in poverty in small and crowded places and were oppressed. For hundreds of years, Jews lived these ways in two communities - the ghetto and the shtetl. To keep out thieves and rioters from coming in, they built walls around their section of town. When they did this, the government and churches got an idea, they would use the walls that the Jews built, to lock them in.
These walls were located near a foundry that made cannons, so they named it “ghetto” which means "foundry". They would close the gates every night and the Jews would be locked in until daybreak. The word of the ghettos quickly spread, soon there were ghettos all over Europe. The Jews were all treated the same in every ghetto that was in Europe, according the government and churches, the Jews had no rights. They were no allowed to own land, join crafts guilds, or do any kind of work that Christians got to do. In some ghettos, they were even forced to wear badges so anyone who saw them would know they were Jewish.
The badge was usually a Star of David. For many years, the government took copies of the Talmud, and burnt them. Also the government forced the Jews to listen to long Christian sermons. Even though all these terrible things took place and the government was not good to the Jews, the ghettos seemed to be a
income in this situation was to sell things at the marketplace, and even there, Jews were
confined to live in the slums. The slums were in a way like ghettos. They were very poor,
...located in central Poland. The building of the ghetto started on February 8, 1940, but took weeks to establish. The Jews lived there until January 6, 1942, when the Jews were beginning to be deported. By August 1944 only a few remained. The ghetto was liberated by the Soviets on January 19, 1945 but only 877 Jews survived. Another ghetto was in Krakow, an important city located in the south of Poland. A ghetto was established by 1941 containing 15,000 to 20,000 Jews behind barbed wire and stone walls. Throughout the ghetto's life there were resistance groups first supporting underground education then advancing to preparing to fight Germans. Another ghetto was in the city of Lvov in southeastern Poland containing 200,000 Jews. A ghetto was established in 1941, and many Jews stayed there until deportation began in March 1942. In June 1943, the ghetto was destroyed.
The Jewish people realized that as a minority they were never going to overcome these higher religious, so they took what they got and built off of it. In history the Jewish people have overcame so much whether it was the Pact of Umar, Barcelona Disputation or the Holocaust the Jewish people have done so much for the world in which we live
and owning only the clothes they wore. The need for assistance was very desperate as thousands
...s problems in the past. Many religions would have fallen and ceased to exist under this kind of persecution. To the Jewish believer this is perhaps because they are the ‘chosen people.’ This religion continues to prove its strength and resilience even today and will continue to do so.
The Germans wanted to control the size of the Jewish population by forcing Jews to lived in segregated sections of towns call Jewish residential quarters or ghettos. They created over 400 ghettos where Jewish adults and children were forced to reside and survive. Most ghettos were located in the oldest, most run-down places in town, that German soldiers to pick to make life in the ghetto as hard as possible. Overcrowding was frequent, several families lived in one apartment, plumbing was apprehended, human excrement was thrown out with the garbage, contagious diseases ran rapid, and hunger was everywhere. During the winter, heating was scarce, and many did not have the appropriate clothing to survive. Jerry Koenig, a Polish Jewish child, remembers: “The situation in the Warsaw Ghetto was truly horrendous- food, water, and sanitary conditions were non-existent. You couldn’t wash, people were hungry, and very susceptible to disease...
The history of the Jewish people is one fraught with discrimination and persecution. No atrocity the Nazis did to the Jews in the Holocaust was original. In England in 1189, a bloody massacre of the Jews occurred for seemingly no reason. Later, the Fourth Lateran Council under Pope Innocent III required Jews to wear a badge so that all would know their race, and then had them put into walled, locked ghettos, where the Jewish community primarily remained until the middle of the eighteenth century. When the Black Death ravaged Europe in the medieval ages, many Europeans blamed the Jews (Taft 7). Yet, the one thing that could be more appalling than such brutal persecution could only be others’ failure and flat-out refusal to intervene. Such is the case with the non-Axis coutries of World War II; these nations failed miserably in their responsibility to grant basic human rights – even the right of life – to Jewish immigrants prior to World War II.
around to hire as cheap labor to search them out and return them. Mulatto and Criollo slaves
to fully comprehend the nature of why they have changed so vastly. Jews came to
Although the Nazis went after many people of whom they did not approve such as Gypsies, communists, socialists, homosexuals and even members of the clergy to name a few, no one suffered more under the Nazi regime as did members of the Jewish community and not just in Poland, but eventually throughout Europe. In 1935, Nazi Germany passed what is known as the Nuremberg Laws. The bigoted and hateful intent of these laws was to “protection of German blood and Honor” and severely restricted the act of Jewish observance and forbade their participation in daily life. In fact, the restrictions were so severe that people were forbidden the simple dignity and joy of walking in a park on a beautiful day.
The term ghetto, originally derived from Venetian dialect in Italy during the sixteenth century, has multiple variations of meaning. The primary perception of the word is “synonymous with segregation” (Bassi). The first defining moment of the ghetto as a Jewish neighborhood was in sixteenth century Italy; however, the term directly correlates with the beginning of the horror that the Jewish population faced during Adolph Hitler’s reign. “No ancient ghetto knew the terror and suffering of the ghettos under Hitler” (Weisel, After the Darkness 20). Under Hitler’s terror, there were multiple ghettos throughout several cities in numerous countries ranging in size and population. Ghettos also differed in purpose; some were temporary housing until deportation to the final solution while others formed for forced labor. Although life in the ghetto was far better than a concentration camp, it shared the commonality of torment, fear, and death.
The Jews were different from the general population of the countries where they were. They had different customs, had a different religion and dressed different. Because they were grouped in the ghettos these differences were increased. However, when Germany became a nation in 1871, there was a halt in anti-Semitic laws. In 1900, Jews could buy houses, and while they were subject to restrictions, they were more comfortable under Ge...
tried to make out that the Jews are the hard done by people and the
rural lifestyle and moving to cities where they could find work, but lived substandard lives.