Photograph of Polish men and women and horse drawn wagons going to a horse market in Piaski, Eastern Poland. Piaski is between Lublin and Chelm, Poland. Once part of the Jewish Pale of Settlement, Jews were allowed to live in the Pale of Settlement, a western border region of Imperial Russia until 1917. The Pale was created in 1791 by Catherine the Great in an effort to remove Jews from most of Russia. Forbidden to live in agricultural communities, Jews moved to small provincial towns, fostering the rise of the shtetls (Yiddish שטעטל shtetl "little town/little city). The area had a high population of Jews until World War II, when most Jews were killed by the Nazis in the Holocaust. Drayman was a common Jewish occupation here before the First World War. Photograph by Nathan Benn taken December 5, 1979.

Location

Piaski, Poland

Tags

Drayman, Eastern Poland, Jewish Pale of Settlement, Nathan Benn, Pale, Pale of Settlement, Piaski, Poland, Russia, horse, jewish, jews, market, photograph, road, shtetls, stock photo, wagon