Pre-War Jewish Life in Eastern Europe

Shabbtai (Shepske) Sonenson takes one of the shtetl's Hebrew teachers for a ride on his new motorcycle, 1941.

A family in Kalisz, Poland, May 16, 1935.

A group of friends sledding in the shtetl, January 12, 1932.

Pupils in the second grade work in their classroom at the Kalecka Jewish elementary school in Warsaw, Poland, ca. 1937–1938.

Ludwig Nachmann, the president of the congregation, follows the Torah reading during a bar mitzvah at the liberal Zerrennerstrasse synagogue in Pforzheim, Germany, 1936. 

Three generations of a Jewish family in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, in 1938 or 1939. In the eighteenth century, Vilnius (Vilna in Yiddish) was a center of Jewish learning. By the 1920s and 1930s roughly a half of the city’s inhabitants were Jews.

A volleyball team in Szczuczyn, Poland. In the interwar years, it was not uncommon for Jewish children to participate in school or community recreational activities with non-Jewish children. Despite the lurking danger of antisemitism, Jews often had close relationships with Christians, which led many to believe that Jewish integration was possible and might even be welcomed.

Irenka and Eliska Huber, sisters, at their home in Czechoslovakia in 1920.

A small ensemble of Jewish musicians performs in Riga, Latvia, in the 1930s.