Category:Urban ScenesViewed: 1681Downloads: 0KeywordsParisFranceMaraisStreetHistoryJewishYiddishPletzltextwrittenDescription: Plaque explaining the significance of Jewish quarter "the Pletzl" in the "Marais" district, Paris, France. Translated, it reads:
Fleeing persecution, Ashkenazi Jews flooded into Paris beginning in 1881. They found places living among their co-religionists already established in the Marais. By 1900, about six thousand had arrived from Rumania, Russia, and Austria-Hungary; eighteen thousand more arrived in the years preceding the first World War. Installed in considerable numbers in the Rue des Ecouffes, the Rue Ferdinand Duval (named Rue des Juifs, "Jews Street", until about 1900), and the Rue des Rosiers, they constituted a new community, the "pletzl", the "little place" in Yiddish, and they created the Ecole Israelite du Travail (Israelite Trade School) at 4B, Rue des Rosiers. The life of this community was evoked in the Roger Ikor novel, Les Eaux Mélées ("Agitated Waters"), [which won the Prix Goncourt in 1955]. More than half of them perished in the Nazi concentration camps.