Argentina ארגנטינה
The largest Jewish community in Latin America grew out of Baron Hirsch's farming colonies: those who fled the pogroms were brought to the pampas and made into ploughmen.
In 1889 a hundred and thirty families from the steamer Weser settled in the pampas and founded Moisés Ville, the country's first Jewish farming colony. A year later Baron Maurice de Hirsch set up the Jewish Colonization Association, and the resettlement ran into tens of thousands: he held that the Jews of Russia were not to be pitied but taken out and put on the land.
The design half succeeded. Few stayed farmers, the children left for the cities, and within a generation the community was urban—Buenos Aires, Rosario, Córdoba. But the phrase "Jewish gauchos" remained, and Alberto Gerchunoff's book under that name became the first Jewish book of Argentina.
By the middle of the twentieth century this was the largest community in Latin America: its own schools, its own Yiddish, its own papers and theatre. On 18 July 1994 a bomb destroyed the AMIA building—the central communal body in Buenos Aires; eighty-five people were killed. The case is unsolved to this day, and that is a wound of its own.
On the timeline
Related
Sources
Documents of the period
- The charter and reports of Baron Hirsch's Jewish Colonization Association, from 1891 — the design of the resettlement and the count of colonists
- Los gauchos judíos, Alberto Gerchunoff, 1910 — the first Jewish book of Argentina, written in the colonies
Basis: documents and evidence.