350 year-old matzevot have sunken so deep into the ground that they are now more like random stones. Hebrew inscriptions are covered with moss and mosquitoes are the only visitors there. This is a typical scene of Bel...

  Journey diary – Belarus Julia Popławska Belarus What do you know about Belarus? Its past appears to boil down to being one of the former Polish provinces while contemporary Belarus is overshadowed with a d...

The Jewish Labor Bund was popular Jewish socialist party in Poland before the Second World War.

It is one and a half hour’s drive from Smolensk to Lyubavichi. The last twenty kilometers of the road resemble Swiss cheese – it is full of holes… Taking care of the chassis, drivers try to avoid the holes in the asph...

Foreword The history of the Belarusian nation is very complex and unclear. From the medieval times on, Belarusian people had belonged to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, then to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and t...

She gave up her career in a bank and started cooking Jewish cuisine dishes. Her restaurant is located next to a synagogue in Tykocin and attracts thousands of foodies. Elżbieta Świętorzecka seems to be constantly o...

‘The past is a foreign country’ – this proverb is obviously false. Time distance cannot be translated into a geographical distance, as it was commonly practiced by 19th-century evolutionists, who...

In mid March, the Virtual Shtetl team was asked to call attention to the case of the Jewish cemetery in Mińsk Mazowiecki. To our horror, the photographs that we received showed gross negligence of the cemetery, showin...

The Latvian region of Latgale is home to unique wooden synagogues, best preserved of all such buildings that have survived in this part of Europe.

By Krzysztof Bielawski Wierzbnik was once a separate locality, then a municipality. It was not before 1939 that it became part of Starachowice. Wierzbnik was a typical shtetl in the Świetokrzyskie region, where Jew...