This is a postcard printed in Germany depicting a Jewish alley in the town of Iwanowo in the Austrian Empire in 1916. As with many places in Eastern Europe, this town has been ruled by many different countries and has had various different names. Today it is located in the Ukraine and is called Ivano-Frankivsk, although it was also previously known as Stanyslaviv, Stanyslavov, and Stanislau. The photograph shows a narrow, crowded, and muddy street. A ditch is running alongside the houses on the right side of the street, and the entrances to the homes are small bridges across the ditch. A few people can be faintly seen in the photograph. Some of the roofs of the houses on the street have been lifted and are held in place by large planks. At the bottom of the postcard is the caption: “Sepple alley in Iwanowa during the festival of Sukkot in 1916.”
It seems that the Jews who lived in this street built their houses with a roof that could be raised. When the festival of Sukkot arrived in the month of Tishrei, they opened the roof, laid schach (the branches used for the ceiling of a sukkah), and sat under it. In this way, they fulfilled the mitzvah (commandment) of sitting in a sukkah that is open to the sky. It is possible that the sukkah was built inside the house with the roof raised due to lack of space in the narrow street or cold autumn weather conditions. It is also possible that sitting in the sukkah inside the house provided a sense of security at a time when hundreds of pogroms were taking place in this region.
This photograph is part of a series of photographs taken by German soldiers (some of whom were Jewish) during World War I, documenting the areas in the Eastern Europe that were occupied by the German Army. For many Jews in Western Europe, these photographs were their first encounter with the Jews living in shtetls in Eastern Europe in the Pale of Settlement. This encounter had large impact on many of these Western Jews whose connection to Jewish tradition was influenced by the “discovery” of more traditional Jews and Jewish lifestyle.
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Sukkot and the Four Species - The Festival of Sukkot (Tabernacles) has two central commandments. The first is that Jews should live in a temporary abode (Sukkah) for seven days (eight days outside of Israel). The second is that on every day of the festival, Jews take the Four Species (Arba’at HaMinim) in hand and make a blessing over them.
Each of the Four Species has certain requirements for them to be fitting (Kosher) for the commandment (Mitzvah). According to tradition, the buyer should check that the requirements are present in each of the species. The Four Species consist of the Lulav (palm branch), the Etrog (citrus fruit), Hadass (myrtle branches) and Aravah (willow branches).
Jewish Community of Stanisławów (also Stanislau or Ivano-Frankivsk) – This is a city situated today in Western Ukraine (today named Ivano-Frankivsk). Throughout history it was ruled by different countries: Poland, the Austro-Hungarian Habsburg Empire, and the USSR (then called Stanisławów). In 1672 the Jews were granted permission to become permanent residents of the city, where they were mainly innkeepers and tradespeople. By the end of the eighteenth century, when Galicia came under Austro-Hungarian rule, the Jewish community numbered 404 families, comprising around forty-five percent of the city’s total population. Towards the end of the nineteenth century the Jewish community was made up of orthodox Hasidic Jews and secular Zionist Jews. This period is depicted in Shai Agnon’s book, A Simple Story, which is located in the town. At the beginning of the twentieth century Jewish newspapers were published in Stanisławów, including the Hebrew monthly journal The Yarden. The Yarden’s editor was Elazar Rokach, who eventually settled in Israel and bought the lands of the Gei Oni village in the north of Israel (later named Rosh Pina). During World War I, the town was destroyed twice by the Russian Army, and many Jews fled to Bohemia and to Vienna. After the war the community numbered 15,500 Jews, and in 1927 a Zionist Jew was elected to be deputy mayor. Between the wars the Jewish community flourished, reaching more than 30,000, a third of the town’s population. During these years many Jewish schools, yeshivot, synagogues, and social organizations were founded. At the outbreak of World War II, Stanisławów came under Soviet rule, and the Jews were persecuted, community leaders were exiled, and most of the Jewish organizations were closed down. In 1941 the Nazis conquered the town and immediately murdered hundreds of Jews in the nearby forest. On October 12, 1941 more than 10,000 Jews were murdered in the local cemetery. Two months later the ghetto was founded, and by the end of 1942 many Jews had been sent to the Belzec extermination camp. The city was declared Judenrein (empty of Jews) on January 1943, and by the end of the war only 300 of the town’s original Jews had survived. According to official information in 2008, today the town has a small community of around 300 Jews and a functioning synagogue, cemetery, mikvah, and a community centre.
Pale of Settlement (known in Hebrew and Yiddish as Tchum Hamoshav) – This was an area in the west of the Russian Empire to which Jews were restricted to live from the end of the eighteenth century until 1917. The area covered all of Belarus, Moldova, Lithuania and some parts of Poland, Ukraine, Latvia, and western Russia. Beyond these borders most of the Jews were prohibited from living in the Russian territories. The Pale of Settlement was first created by Catherine the Great in 1791 in an effort to remove the Jews from Russia unless they agreed to convert to Christianity. Within the Pale, most Jews lived in hard conditions in little towns known as shtetls. Most of them followed Jewish traditions, and the community was organised by the Jewish Council of Elders, which had a certain degree of autonomy and was responsible for the social welfare organisations. The concentration of the Jews in the region made them easy targets for pogroms and anti-Semitic persecution. On the other hand, it also enabled the development of Jewish institutions, thought, and culture, Yiddish literature, Hasidism and the modern yeshiva system. The life of the Jews in the shtetl is depicted in the work of many Yiddish writers, such as Shalom Aleichem and Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Jewish artists, such as Marc Chagall.
