Behind the Headlines Resurgent Anti-semitism in Argentina

PART ONE

“We will all go to Argentina and once again-work the land, and care for our flocks….You’ll see! You’ll seel It’s a land where everyone works and where the Christian won’t hate us, because there the sky is different and in his soul are found mercy and justice.” (Alberto Gerchunoff, “Los Gauchos Judios”)

In 1910, when Argentina celebrated its first centenary of independence, a Russian-born Jewish immigrant published a collection of stories in Buenos Aires as his homage to the land where the sky was different and Christian didn’t hate Jew. Alberto Gerchunoff, author of the volume which he entitled “Los Gauchos Judios” (The Jewish Cowboys), was one of a group of Russian Jewish settlers brought to Argentina by the Jewish Colonization Association at the turn of the century as part of Baron Maurice de Hirsch’s plan to find new homes for Jews living under the heel of czarist Mother Russia.

Later, becoming a prominent newspaperman and writer, Gerchunoff described in a series of short vignettes how observant, Yiddish-speaking shtetl Jews who didn’t know the first thing about agriculture, became farmers, adjusting to the ways of the Argentine countryside even as they sought to maintain their Jewish identity.

In 1975, “Los Gauchos Judios” was brought to the screen and caused an immediate reaction. During the movie’s premier in Buenos Aires, incendiary bombs were hurled at the entrance to Cine Broadway where the picture was being shown while “unknowns” destroyed glass doors and seats on the premises and distributed virulently anti-Semitic handbills claiming that “gold” was the Jewish gaucho’s seed, “usury, their plow; man, their beast of burden; their fruit, the blood of the Argentines.”

Even before the movie’s opening, during the filming, there was an attempted arson on the set which destroyed scenery and technical equipment and forced the interruption of work for a week. After that, the area where the movie was being shot was placed under armed guard. A preview of “Los Gauchos Judios” scheduled by a Buenos Aires cinema club was cancelled at the last moment when the picture’s director, Juan Jose Jusid received threats.

DIFFERENT HISTORICAL MOMENTS

The apparent contradiction between Gerchunoff’s paean to Argentina as the Promised Land and the incidents at the Cine Broadway are largely a result of the historical moments which produced each. Gerchunoff wrote at a time when Argentina was the most modern, prosperous, and powerful nation of all those that had come into being out of the dismemberment of the Spanish empire in the New World; when for scores of European immigrants–Jews included–the republic on the River Plate symbolized America.

The movie version of his work, on the other hand, opened at a time of trouble for Argentina when the country is undergoing one of its severest political, economic, and social crises, with extremists both on the right and the left trying to outdo each other in the violence of their words and acts. In the midst of this chaos, the government of Isabel Peron, widow of Juan Peron, the general idolized by the Argentine masses, flounders in the maelstrom literally like a ship that has lost its captain.

The anti-Semitic outburst generated by “Los Gauchos Judios” (which had some of Argentina’s finest actors, Jewish and non-Jewish, in its cast) must be seen against this general state of affairs in Argentina and is but one example of a long list of hostile events that for the past several months have put the country’s 450,000 Jews on guard. Other such acts have included:

RECENT ANTI-SEMITIC ACTS

* Anti-Semitic articles in the press, mostly in newspapers and magazines published by rightist and leftist groups in Buenos Aires and in provincial newspapers.

* The banning by the authorities of a mass meeting in commemoration of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising to be held in the city of Cordoba for “reasons of security.”

* A television program on a major Buenos Aires station featuring the Libyan ambassador in which accusations were made against Israel, the Jewish religion, and an alleged Jewish scheme–the so-called “Plan Andinia”–to create a new State of Israel through the taking over of certain Argentine provinces.

* A bomb caused damage to the front of Buenos Aires’ Paso Synagogue.

* The “Jewish Hour” broadcast for more than 25 years in the provincial city of Rosario was cancelled for “programming reasons” and replaced by an Arab program.

This resurgent anti-Semitism is fomented both by local extremists anxious to exploit the current unrest, as well as by Arab interests. Of late, Argentina’s traditional friendliness to Israel has weakened. At the recent United Nations Conference on Women, for example, Argentina was one of the sponsors of the final resolution condemning Zionism along with other world “evils.”

AWARENESS RATHER THAN PANIC

Despite the seriousness of the situation, a month-long visit to Argentina this summer–winter in the Southern Hemisphere–left this correspondent with the impression that Argentine Jews are just as, if not more, worried about the overall falling apart of things than about the particularly anti-Jewish manifestations. There is a feeling that one breeds the other and that when order is restored to the nation’s political and economic life the incidents will abate.

There seems to be no panic in the Jewish community, rather an awareness of what one leader called “the magnitude of the dangers which loom” coupled with a determination to defend Jewish rights and property, to protest vigorously against any outrage, and to keep the lines of communication open with responsible political figures. (Part Two tomorrow.)

AWARENESS RATHER THAN PANIC

A book published here on the 100th anniversary of the death of Hans Christian Andersen relates Jewish motifs in the Danish fairy tales to Andersen’s supposedly Jewish origins. Dutch author Helene van Woelderen believes that the Danish storyteller took his origins directly from the Dan tribe, one of the 10 lost tribes of Israel. According to Ms. van Woelderen, the Dan tribe settled in Denmark. Among Ms. van Woelderen’s other theories is one that the Dutch people descend from the Zebulon tribe.