Pale of Settlement
[Russian, cherta osedlosti] - A region where
Jews were allowed to live designated by the tsarist
government in the
Western guberniias of the Russian Empire.
After the second and third partitions of Poland, when
most of the
Polish Jews found themselves in the Russian partition, the
first ukazy
were issued resulting in the creation of a separate zone for
them. They
were forbidden from moving from one place to another, and
from settling
in cities within Russia proper; Jews also began to be forced
out of the
countryside.
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After the Napoleonic wars, Tsar Alexander I,
after a brief period when restrictions were less severe,
made the Pale
of Settlement smaller. A ban was also introduced on Jews
living along
the western border in a swath 50 versts wide. The borders of
this zone
were defined in 1836, and included the guberniias of
Volhynia, Grodno,
Wilno, Podole, Minsk, Ekaterinoslav and Bessarabia, the Kiev
province
(without Kiev), Kherson (without Nikolaev), Taurida (without
Sevastopol), Mohyl and Vitebsk (without its rural
settlements), some of
Chernihov and Poltava.
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Further restrictions on Jews' freedom of
residence were imposed in 1882, when Tsar Alexander III
established the
May Laws, on the basis of which it was decided to expel Jews
from the
cities of Russia proper and from the countryside of the Pale
of
Settlement. The resettlement program affected a total of
approximately
one million people. The Pale of Settlement continued to
exist until the
Russian Revolution.
(G.Z./CM)
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