shtetl

thumb|300px|An 1893 Isaak_Asknaziy#Selected_paintings|painting by the artist [[Isaak Asknaziy of a Jewish wedding with a band in a ]] ' or ' ( ; , ; pl. shtetelekh) is a Yiddish term for small towns with predominantly Ashkenazi Jewish populations which existed in Eastern Europe before the Holocaust. The term is used in the context of pre-Second World War European Jewish societies as communities within the surrounding non-Jewish populace, and thus bears certain connotations of discrimination. (or , , or ) were mainly found in the areas that constituted the 19th-century Pale of Settlement in the Russian Empire (constituting modern-day Belarus, Lithuania, Moldova, Ukraine, Poland, Latvia and Russia), as well as in Congress Poland, Austrian Galicia and Bukovina, the Kingdom of Romania and the Kingdom of Hungary.

In Yiddish, a larger city, like Lviv or Chernivtsi, is called a (), and a village is called a (). is a diminutive of with the meaning 'little town'. Despite the existence of Jewish self-administration (/), officially there were no separate Jewish municipalities, and the was referred to as a or (, in Russian bureaucracy), a type of settlement which originated in the former Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and was formally recognized in the Russian Empire as well. For clarification, the expression "Jewish " was often used.