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Hello Z. Glad to see you here.
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The Jewish communities were organized into filial Kahals, so that even if there was one or two families in a village, they had a definite filial community to which they belonged. The Kahal took care of their own spriritually, kept all the metrikal data, and also acted as a charity for the very poor among them.
Most District Center Towns were referred to as shtetls and this was where the Kahals were located, because that is where there were large groupings of Jews. Of course, there were others also living in these towns, but not in the same numbers. There were restrictions on land ownership, especially in the Pale of Russia, so without these options Jews were in businesses of all kinds. In the villages they were frequently the inn keepers, store keepers and commodity middlemen.
During WW2 when the Nazis started to herd and massacre them en masse, the district towns became ghostly versions of what they had been. Some district center towns became district center villages, and many still are 60 yrs later.
However if you talk to the locals about towns actually disappearing, Stalin's Scorched Earth Policy still holds all the records.
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