Filmmakers constructed an acre-sized shtetl for a Ukrainian WWII film. Now they want to preserve it as a museum.

(JTA) — In the woods of northern Ukraine, construction workers have built an island in time: a shtetl.

That’s the Yiddish word for the type of old-fashioned Jewish towns that existed throughout Eastern Europe before the Holocaust.

This new shtetl, comprising 18 buildings on more than an acre of land near the lakeside town of Rovzhi, near Kyiv, was built this summer over 50 days as the set for a historical feature film titled “Shttl.” (The “e” is missing to underline emptiness, director Edie Walter, an Argentina-born filmmaker, told the Ukrainian news site KP)