Life for Jews living in the Pale of Settlement was a weave of family and community; prosperity mingled with poverty; periods of normalcy and the ordinary; grinding persecution, pogrom, fear, degredation, and finally Holocaust. Jews built and contributed, went about their every day, and most put G-d in everything they did. They lived alongside good gentiles and xenophobic gentiles, always sub-citizens of the ruling Christian powers, tragically too often targets of tyrants and marauders. Jewish families and their organizations built vibrant communities and strong merchantile economies. They erected grand structures and proud homes. They contributed to society, proudly wore their country's uniform (that is until WW II), and policed, fought, and sacrificed with their countrymen during brief periods of toleration. They did their best to live as normal people. They were normal people.

But always, they paid a dreadful price to sanctify The Lord in Christian lands.

This site attempts to understand and present the daily ordinariness of Jewish communities and family life in the shtetls as well as to document present day antisemitism that still ferments throughout Europe and Russia and to warn about the growing and very real existential threat to Israel from Islam, co-sponsored by traditional anti-semites.

So much is known about the Holocaust and more is to be found. Not as widely documented is what our relatives and their neighbors did when not faced with deprivation and slaughter. How would life have been, what would Europe look like now if its most vulnerable minority had not been brutally annihilated in the Holocaust? The region once called Volhynia in a prior time of Poland, now Ukraine and centered around the small city of Sarny is explored in these pages. More shtetl life from other areas of the Pale will be added through your contributions of materials and links.

Contact us to add your information.  This a free service.