Why Pletzl?
Some time ago, the City of Paris installed a plaque at the corner of the Rue des Rosiers and the Rue Ferdinand Duval that explains why the Jewish quarter is known as the "Pletzl". 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 6,000 had arrived from Rumania, Russia and Austria-Hungary; 18,000 more arrived in the years preceding the First World War. Installed in considerable numbers in the Rue des Écouffes, 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 École 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 Mêlées ("Agitated Waters"), . More than half of them perished in the Nazi concentration camps.
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