A shtetl (, diminutive form of Yiddish shtot ?????, "town", similar to the South German diminutive "St?dtel/St?dtle", "little town"), was a small town with a large Jewish population in Central and Eastern Europe before the pogroms and the Holocaust. Shtetls (Yiddish plural: ???????, shtetlekh) were mainly found in the areas which constituted the 19th century Pale of Settlement in the Russian Empire, the Congress Kingdom of Poland, Galicia and Romania.