Community
By Sara Marcus
Sunday, January 31, 2021 at 12:35 pm | י ח שבט תשפ א
Le Chambon-sur-Lignon. (Havang|nl)
When Erich Schwam passed away in December, his will had an unusual specification: hundreds of thousands of Euros were to be sent to the small southern French village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon.
Schwam and his parents were Jewish refugees from Austria who were given shelter in Le Chambon, which took in Jews, mostly children, from the Rivesaltes internment camp, which was set up by the Vichy government in France to house Jews until they were sent to death camps.
Led by a heroic Christian minster, the town hid Jewish refugees in farms and homes, and forged identity cards and food ration cards for them. The citizens of the town would refuse to point out which of the hundreds of orphaned children in its schools were Jewish to Vichy officials who wanted lists of names.
shtetl,” our minds immediately turn to
Fiddler on the Roof. The 1964 hit Broadway musical and 1971 film is set in Anatevka, a fictional shtetl that depicts an insular, homogenous community in Ukraine in 1905.
It’s no surprise that the story of Tevye and company resonates with so many of us, as it so beautifully details shtetl life but ultimately ends with spoiler alert! the family becoming displaced by pogroms and moving to America. Between 1900 and 1924, some 2 million Jews fled to the United States, the majority from the Pale of Settlement the Eastern European region that included Russian Poland, Lithuania, Belarus (Belorussia), most of Ukraine, the Crimean Peninsula, and Bessarabia. Among those Jews who remained, many fell victims to antisemitic violence, the Holocaust, and the suppression of Judaism in the Soviet era.