Behind the Headlines the Jews of Argentina

The Jewish community of Argentina is in many respects one generation behind the rest of Western Jewry. The gap does not involve material things since communal organizations are very much up to date in terms of using state-of-the-arts-technology such as computers, comparable to that used by the most advanced American Jewish Federations and fund-raising organizations.

The generation gap is rather in the structure of the community and in its cultural life.

Perhaps the most salient example is the way the Asociacion Mutual Israelita Argentina (AMIA), the central religious and communal organization of Buenos Aires, is run — along party-political lines. All the traditional Zionist parties are represented, and they fight each other with vigor at election time, and cooperate uneasily between elections in shifting coalitions.

In other Western communities this outworn –many would say anachronistic — set-up is found in the Zionist Federations (and is widely criticized by the younger generation there). In Argentina, the parties and their officials still hold sway over the central communal organ, to which virtually all Ashkenazi Jews have recourse. (The Sephardim have their own separate organization.)

NEW WINDS BLOWING THROUGH THE JEWISH COMMUNITY

AMIA elections are scheduled for this spring, and, probably under the influence of the nation’s return to democracy under President Raul Alfonsin, new winds are blowing through the Jewish community, too.

A group calling itself Brera or Choice has been established by liberal-inclined communal leaders, and they are of a mind to run in the elections and challenge the long-held hegemony of the Labor-Zionist Party.

The moving spirit is Saul Rochberger, a former president of the Hebraica, the big sports-and-culture movement within the Jewish community. Brera’s platform, Rochberger told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, calls for religious pluralism — that is, a role in the communal leadership structure for Conservative and Reform–and universal suffrage.

The virtual monopoly of the Orthodox is another example of Argentina’s "lagging behind the times," Rochberger and other Brera figures feel. They attribute it in part at least to inter-party deals dictated by the Zionist parties’ head offices in Israel to their adherents in Buenos Aires.

The suffrage rules at present permit only paid-up AMIA members for two years prior to the election to vote in the poll. In the last election, a mere 8,000 people voted, out of some 30,000 eligible members. Brera wants to see new, broader-based rules that would encourage younger people to take an interest in communal life.

ANOTHER HANGOVER FROM THE PAST

Another hangover from the past, common nowadays only in Latin American Jewry and prevalent particularly in Argentina, is secular Jewish education, and even Yiddishist education. This is a thing of the past in most other parts of the diaspora where Jewish education is usually religiously — though not necessarily Orthodox — oriented.

Countrywide in Argentina, according to Jewish officials here, some 20,000 Jewish children attend Jewish schools. This is an impressive figure — but it means that many tens of thousands of other Jewish children do not receive Jewish schooling.

(The overall Jewish population figure for Argentina is a matter of controversy among experts. The best assessment by Israeli demographers is around 250,000.)

According to Labor Knesset member Rabbi Menachem Hacohen, many of the children not attending Jewish schools are denied Jewish education because their parents cannot afford it. They are children of the lower middle class: families of wage-earning parents who are suffering harshly from Argentina’s economic crisis.

Hacohen has visited Argentina and spent time touring educational institutions. The very rich, he says, can afford the best Jewish schools. The very poor — their poverty is established by stringent means tests — have their tuition paid for by the community. But the in-betweens suffer.

For instance, Hacohen noted in a recent conversation with JTA, a frequent means test question is: did you have a summer holiday? Most Argentines go to great effort to spend part of the long summer vacation at the seaside. But that does not mean, in many cases, that they are well-off enough to pay the often steep fees in Jewish schools – especially when non-Jewish schooling is free.

THE COLONY OF MOISESVILLE

One Jewish community I visited where virtually all the children attend the Jewish school is the colony of Moisesville, the first of the agricultural settlements established by the turn-of-the-century European Jewish philanthropist Baron Maurice (Moses) Hirsch.

Situated in the Santa Fe province, some 600 kilometers from Buenos Aires, Moisesville is no longer the entirely Jewish township it was 20 or 30 years ago. But there are still nearly 1,000 Jews (some 30 percent of the present population). Most of the Jewish families own small cattle farms in the area.

All the children attend the Yahadut school and many go on to the teachers’ seminar that functions in the school building in the afternoon. (The seminar, founded in the 1950’s by local educator Yosef Dreznin, takes in students from other Jewish communities, too, who board in Moisesville during the school term.)

The teachers, mostly young women who live in Moisesville and whose husbands farm in the area, are all fluent in Hebrew and some speak a fine literary Yiddish, too.

Why do they choose to stay in this small and remote village? Says Chava Gelbert-Rosenthal, long-time teacher at the seminar and mother of three, "There is no better place to bring up children. " Her son and two daughters love the outdoor life. "Ariel is a gaucho in spirit," Chava says of her nine-year-old flaxen-haired son Arye whose pride and joy is his chestnut mare.

Many young people from Moisesville moved to Israel over the years, some of them settling on kibbutzim and moshavim there. Many others moved off to Cordoba, Rosario or Buenos Aires, in search of university education and broader opportunities. Those who remain, Chava stresses, do so "because we like the life."

A visitor from the outside may well envy Chava and her friends and family their quiet, bucolic existence. But Moisesville, too, conjures up in the minds of some Jewish visitors from abroad pictures of the shtetl.