![]() ![]() Most of the Jews of Łódź were poor and Orthodox, mainly followers of the Aleksander and Ger Hasidic rebbes. The city’s Jewish population increased from about 10,000 in 1873 to nearly 100,000 in 1897. ![]() Łódź attracted Jews from throughout Russian Poland and the tsarist Pale of Settlement. When Bałuty was annexed to Łódź in 1915, it was home to perhaps half the city’s Jews, and its name became a byword for poverty. Bałuty grew haphazardly, without running water or sewer lines, creating a neighborhood for the masses of the poor. ![]() In the 1850s, Jewish entrepreneurs Isaac Bławat and Isaac Birnzwajg developed housing in the village of Bałuty (Yid., Balut), beyond the city limits. Jews established retail and other businesses, eventually breaking into textile manufacturing as well, although they were largely restricted to an overcrowded residential quarter in the Old Town. (Archiwum Państwowe, Łódź)ĭuring Łódź’s first decades of growth (1820–1864), textile mills built by German manufacturers such as Ludwig Geyer and Karl Scheibler attracted masses of Polish peasants to work in what the Polish novelist Władysław Reymont called Ziemia obiecana (The Promised Land 1899). ![]()
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