Ghetto, Ghetto

Jewish quarters, like the Jewish ghettos in Europe, were often the outgrowths of segregated ghettos instituted by the surrounding Christian authorities or in World War Two, the Nazis. A Yiddish term for a Jewish quarter or neighborhood is "Di yiddishe gas" ( ), or "The Jewish street". Many European and Middle Eastern cities once had a historical Jewish quarter and some still have it.

In other cases, ghettos were places of terrible poverty and during periods of population growth, ghettos had narrow streets and tall, crowded houses. Residents had their own justice system. Around the ghetto stood walls that, during pogroms, were closed from inside to protect the community, but from the outside during Christmas, Pesach, and Easter Week to prevent the Jews from leaving during those times.

Though the common usage is ghetto, the Nazis most often referred to these areas in documents and signage at their entrances as Judischer Wohnbezirk or Wohngebiet der Juden (German); both translate as Jewish Quarter. These Nazi ghettos used to concentrate Jews before extermination sometimes coincided with traditional Jewish ghettos and Jewish quarters, but not always. Expediency was the key factor for the Nazis in the Final Solution. Nazi ghettos as stepping stones on the road to the extermination of European Jewry existed for varying amounts of time, usually the function of the number of Jews who remained to be killed but also because of the employment of Jews as slave labor by the Wehrmacht and other German institutions, until Heinrich Himmler's decree issued on June 21, 1943, ordering the dissolution of all ghettos in the East and their transformation into concentration camps.

Many immigrated to the USA and Israel. With the cold war progressing, industry was spread across the major cities and work assignments were given out. Outcasts, gypsies and the uneducated poor were trucked as supplementary workforce and these vacant ghettos were given to them as homes. In turn, these areas became very dangerous and are still this way today. One prominent example is the Kasimir neighborhood of Krakow. Because of the problem, many private security forces exist in the city that are commonly hired for tourist groups that wish to visit such unfortunately placed landmarks.

Little Italys across the country were predominantly Italian ghettos. Brighton Beach is the home of mostly Russian and Ukrainian immigrants.

For many African Americans, the ghetto was "home": a place representing authentic blackness and a feeling, passion, or emotion derived from rising above the struggle and suffering of being black in America. Smitherman, Geneva. Black Talk: Words and Phrases from the Hood to the Amen Corner. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000.

Southall Broadway in London, where less than 12 percent of the population is white, has been cited as an example of a 'ghetto', but in reality the area is home to a number of different ethnic groups and religious groups.

Source: Wikipedia > Ghetto