Marketplace in old Rzeszow
Jewish migration from Galicia
If this Ringel family was typical, we are getting a picture of movement of young Jewish people migrating from their family towns in Galicia to cosmopolitan centers in Germany. This is happening at the same time that a far greater migration of Galician Jews is underway to the United States and other countries, so the inter-European migratory patterns happening at the same time are sometimes overlooked.
Rzeszów was a midsize Galician city midway between Kraków and Lemberg, as the present-day city of Lviv was known by its German name. As many as 6,000 Jews lived in Rzeszów in the years of Schija’s youth, about two-fifths of the city’s population. The Jews of Reishe, as it was called in Yiddish, lived in the old quarter and followed a mostly traditional shtetl life focused around religion, family and commerce.
Previously a part of Poland, Galicia was attached to the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1871. The region still ran like a feudal state, with the true power exercised by a handful of Polish landowners. Jews made their living under the economy and laws set by these overlords. Over the previous centuries, through recurring cycles of repression and liberalization, Jews gradually obtained more and more rights.
