A shtetl was typically a small town with a large Jewish population in Central Europe and Eastern Europe from a period between the late 18th Century until the mid 20th Century. Typically, the Holocaust is the marker for the end of this way of life.
Shtetl in "Shtetl Days"
Even though shtetls were wiped out by the Greater German Reich during the War of Retribution, the Reich's Commissariat for the Strengthening of the German Populace re-established shtetls as tourist attractions in the mid 21st Century. These attractions employed German actors in the roles of the long extinct Jews. In one such attraction, Wawolnice, the actors soon grew to identify with the Jewish characters they played more than the harsh world of the Reich. Thus both the Jews and the shtetl community were reborn.