The Jewish Community of Argentina

Argentina

República Argentina

The Jews of Argentina

1853 | The Portuguese Cruise to South America

In 1580, due to a temporary unification of Spain and Portugal, a migration of anusim (crypto-Jews) Jews in Portugal who were forced to hide their Jewish identity due to the Spanish Inquisition, began from the Iberian Peninsula to the area later to become known as Argentina. The choice of Argentina was no coincidence. The seat of the South-American Inquisition was then in Lima, Peru, and the Jews chose to settle as far as possible from the fury and zeal of the Catholic Church. Many still chose to keep hiding their Jewish identity, and this is why historical research knows so little about them. It is known that they settled in the cities of Buenos Aires, Cordoba and San Miguel de Tucuman.

In 1813 the Inquisition was officially abolished, and 12 years later, in 1825, the emerging independent regime in Argentina granted freedom of religion to followers of all faiths, including the Jews, but this was limited to the private sphere only. 28 years after that, in 1853, the constitution of Argentina stated that the followers of all creeds shall enjoy full freedom of religion, almost with no limit or qualification – but only almost. The president and cabinet members were required to be of the Catholic faith. The move to religious freedom was completed in 1888, when the Argentine government passed the Civil Marriage Law.


1881 | Shifting Sands

In 1881 massive pogroms broke out within the Jewish Pale of Settlement in the Russian Empire, that came to be known in Jewish history as “Whirlwinds of the South”, driving large waves of emigration towards the New World, which included Argentina. The Argentine authorities welcomed the immigrants, even appointing a special official to direct Jewish migration to the country. The initiative aroused anti-Semitic fervor in the local press, and the year 1890 saw the publication of the anti-Semitic novel “La Bolsa” by Jose Maria Miro, which remained in print for countless editions through dozens of years.

The Jewish immigrants landed on well-tilled ground. Ten years prior an organized Jewish community infrastructure has been established, to include kosher slaughter, marriage, circumcision and regular synagogue prayer services.
While the Argentine immigration authorities favored ethno-cultural homogeneity and encouraged the Jewish immigrants to assimilate into the local population and adopt its culture, the large numbers of immigrants from all over the world (in 1914 there were some 2,358,000 immigrants living in Argentina) made it hard to create a “melting pot.” Save for a single incident in which the Jewish school in Buenos Aires was closed, the Jews enjoyed full religious freedom and the right to preserve their culture. And the community indeed flourished. From 1895 to 1911 the number of Jews in Argentina soared from 6,000 to about 120,000 people.


1896 | The Degania of Argentina

One strolling through the town of Moises Ville, north of Buenos Aires, may think they had stumbled upon a Western movie set. The open spaces, the dense heat, the main square dominated by the local saloon with its creaky ceiling fan – all these look like the classical backdrop to a pan-American pistol duel between the good and the bad. But a quick glance at the street names in Moises Ville – Theodore Herzl, Baron Hirsch and others – reveals that the town was home to mostly Jewish gauchos who rose each morning to milk the cows, but not before a quick shacharit prayer at the local synagogue.

And indeed, 20 years before the pioneers of Degania and Kinneret established farming communities on the shores of the little lake in the Land of Israel, reviving the biblical myth of the Jewish farmer and Hebrew labor, the pioneers of the rural Argentinian colonies were the ones to battle harsh conditions and troublesome disease, winning out in the end.

The Jewish agricultural settlement enterprise, mostly in the province of Entre Rios (“Between Rivers”) included many other locations, known as “Colonies.” Argentina was the only country in South America in which Jewish communities established villages and towns. As of 1896 there was about 10,000 Jewish farmers in Argentina.

The founders of Moises Ville had a goal of founding a Jewish settlement based on agriculture whose residents would work the land. At its height the town was home to thousands of Jews. It featured seven synagogues, schools, a teaching seminary, youth movement, cultural centers and a theater house called “Kadima”.

In early 21st century the population of Moises Ville was 2,500, mostly non-Jews, but there was still an active Jewish school, a synagogue, a cultural center and a museum documenting the history of the colony. In early 2000s, the Argentine government declared the colony a national heritage site, turning it into a magnet for tourists, mostly Jewish.


1920 | The Argentine Shtetl

In 1920, two years after the end of WW1, some 79,000 Jews migrated to Argentina, mostly from Russia. The mass migration, which stemmed among other things from the closing of US borders, stoked a negative attitude towards Jews in Argentina and led to calls to close the borders to them. The fact that many of the Jewish immigrants held socialist views was to their detriment. The Bolshevik revolution in Russia in 1917 aroused fear among the Argentine authorities from the “red Jews,” who would arrive with the Communist Manifesto tucked under their arm, singing the International at the top of their lungs. Later on the Jews (known derisively as “Russians,) would be blamed for the rise of the fascists in 1930, a development which was a reaction to the supposedly left-leaning climate they had created.

Despite anti-Semitic voices in Argentina, the Jewish immigrants succeeded in creating workplaces for themselves and entered all branches of the economy. Many of them were textile merchants, shop owners, grain exporters, practitioners of free professions, major industrialists and more. The Jews even established trade unions “Jewish Carpenters Union,” “Jewish Farmers Union,” and more, and a Jewish hospital. Cultural life flourished as well: in 1914 there were approximately 40 Jewish periodicals operating in Argentina, alongside the Yiddish dailies “Di Yiddishe Tsaytung” (which is still published to this day) and “Di Prese,” whose target audience were Jews on the left side of the political map.
The Jewish community in Argentina in those years was a microcosm of Eastern European Jewry. Alongside the majority of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, Argentina also became home for Jews from the Ottoman Empire and Jewish communities in the Middle East, among them that of Aleppo in Syria.


Year Jews in Argentina (Estimate)
1895 6,085
1914 117,000
1947 249,000
1960 275,000


1930 | Argentine Jewry's Black Stain

By the end of the 19th century, Buenos Aires was flooded with hundreds of thousands of immigrants from all over the world. The gender ratio in the city stood at ten men to each woman. This reality, alongside the social and economic hardships common to immigrants, gave birth to a widespread industry of prostitution and pimps (ruffianos in Spanish,) many of whom were Jewish men.

The Jewish ruffianos established a widespread network of brothels in Buenos Aires, bribed judges and politicians and adopted mafioso-type mannerisms. The ruffianos used to solicit Jewish girls into prostitution by fraud. They would send a handsome, decent-looking man to the Jewish communities in Eastern Europe, who would recruit poor Jewish women to work in the homes of rich Argentines. On the shipboard journey to Argentina these women underwent what the Jewish ruffianos termed “reeducation”, which was nothing less than repeated brutal rape.

The Jewish community excoriated the Jewish ruffianos, denying them burial at the Jewish cemeteries and banning them from the synagogues. But it was to no avail. Their power grew exponentially, as did their shamelessness. They built themselves a lavish synagogue in the middle of the Jewish neighborhood of Buenos Aires, and even conducted their business there. The ground floor was reserved for a prayer hall, whereas the second floor was a brothel.

In 1930 the prostitution ring was shut down after Rachel Liberman, a Jewish woman who had been forced to work for the ruffianos and had managed to free herself, exposed them with great courage. The case was handed to the care of investigating judge Dr. Rodriguez Ocampo, who rejected the massive bribes the Jewish ruffianos offered him. “The existence of this organization is a threat to our society,” Ocampo ruled, ending one of the saddest and most shameful episodes in the annals of Argentina's Jews.


1948 | Impermanent Aliyah?

When news came to Argentina of the Holocaust raging in Europe, the Jewish organizations in the country tried to persuade the nationalist Argentine government, which came to power in 1930, to aid in the rescue of 1,000 Jewish children. Despite the Argentine authorities' reserved sympathy, the operation was a failure. The children, like many other Jews trying to escape the clutches of the Nazis, met with strict immigration rules.

Those years saw anti-Semitic winds blowing in Argentina, fed through incitement by branches of the Nazi party and German diplomats stationed in Argentina. Concurrently the Jewish community continued its efforts to develop Jewish public and cultural life.

In 1946 charismatic leader Juan Peron came to power, a former senior military officer and a great admirer of Italian fascism. Peron's rise caused concern among the Jewish community, mostly due to his warm relationship with the Nazi regime. But these fears were allayed upon the establishment of the new Argentine constitution, which prohibited ethnic discrimination, and Peron's declaration that he would respect the rights of the Jews.

The establishment of the State of Israel uplifted the spirits of many Argentine Jews. Many Zionist organizations were founded, and the Jewish education system adopted the Hebrew language and the Zionist ideology. A stream of Argentinian immigrants began to trickle into Israel. These olim founded eight new kibbutzim, and others joined existing kibbutzim and the less collectivist moshavim movement. However, the rate of immigrants from Argentina was relatively low. By 1960 there were only 5,000 Argentine Jews in Israel. Many of them failed to find their place in the young country, and returned to Argentina within a few years of arrival.


1962 | Evil Captured and Tried

“The granary of the world” - that was what Argentina was called in the early 20th century, thanks to the great economic boom that turned it into one of the most prosperous countries on earth. But in 1930 something began to go wrong. The fascist virus, which had attacked many countries in those years, settled in the land of the tango as well, and for 43 years, until 1983, regimes changed in Argentina with alarming regularity – from cruel military juntas to corrupt “democracies” and back again.

In this climate, which glorified power, force and military pomp, Argentina became one of the only countries in the world to grant asylum to Nazi criminals. One of them, Adolph Eichmann, was the man who oversaw the execution of the “final solution” - Hitler's plan to destroy the Jewish people.
In 1962 one of the Israeli Mossad's most famous operations was carried out, in which Eichmann was captured at his home in a suburb of Buenos Aires and brought to Israel to stand trial. The Eichmann trial was a seminal even in Israeli consciousness. Many Holocaust survivors, who until then were treated critically in Israel and blamed for going “like sheep to the slaughter,” were finally given voice, and their testimonies exposed the extent of evil and suffering that had wounded their souls forever.

While in Israel the testimonies of the survivors echoed, powerfully showing how far antisemitism could go, in Argentina antisemitism remained commonplace. Just to illustrate, 142 of the 313 anti-Semitic incidents recorded world-wide in 1967 occurred in Argentina alone.
The swan song of Argentine fascism began in 1976, with the ascent to power of the country's final military dictatorship. The years 1976-1983 were characterized by the persecution of left-wing supporters and the arrest of tens of thousands of people sent to languish in prison with no legal charge. During what became known as “The Dirty War,” many Jewish left-wing activists “disappeared,” in far greater numbers than their share of the population. One of the better known activists was Rabbi Marshall Meyer, a key human rights advocate, whose work in the field was only recognized by the Argentine government after the military rule ended.


2014 | The Jewish Community in the Early 21st Century

One of the most traumatic experiences of the Jewish community in Argentina took place on July 18, 1994, when a Lebanese terrorist detonated an explosive device hidden in a car near the Jewish community building. 85 people were killed and 330 wounded. It was one of

two terrorist attacks that took place in Argentina in the 1990s and is considered one of the worst ever on Argentine soil.
Lately the attack has been back in the news after Alberto Nisman, the Jewish prosecutor appointed to investigate the incident, was found dead a day before he was supposed to deliver important testimony at court. Most observers believe that the Argentine government is still trying to cover up details related to that terrible episode.

In 2014 some 250,000 Jews lived in Argentina, mostly of Ashkenazi descent and some Sephardi and Mizrachi (mostly from Syria and Lebanon.) The lion's share of Jews live in Buenos Aires, mostly in the Once neighborhood, where many signs in Hebrew can be seen, indicating the origins and identity of the local residents.

The Jewish community in Argentina is considered richly diverse. Among famous Argentine Jews are talented conductor Daniel Barenboim, philosopher and founder of the “Frankfurt School” Felix Jose Weil and decorated football coach Jose Pekerman.

The Jewish community in Argentina is very tight-knit and operates a well-organized system of schools and hundreds of synagogues. The Buenos Aires community is considered particularly Zionist, and some of its members even made aliyah to Israel following the economic crisis that took place in the country in 2001. The city is home to several Jewish schools, among them the Talpiot school, which caters to national-religious Jews, a Chabad school and the Dr. Herzl school, which is affiliated with the Yonah congregation. The city is also home to local organizations which strengthen the Hebrew and Jewish culture and ties with the State of Israel.
One of the unique characteristics of Jewish life in Argentina is small lavish settlements, each a sort of closed country club, in which upper-class Jews are the members. These are used mainly as weekend getaways and as the setting for various social and sporting events. Two of these exclusive clubs are Hacoaj and Cissab.