CARMEL, Argentina ? Through the years, they?ve seen Jewish schools and synagogues close and said tearful goodbyes to the young who migrated to cosmopolitan Buenos Aires.
But in hamlets with names like Sajaroff and Sonnenfeld, a tight-knit community of Jewish elders, some in their late 80s, fight to hold back time. On Argentina?s endless plains only a few Jewish cowboys still ride. Synagogues once filled with pious congregants now stand empty and forlorn on the edge of soybean fields.
Yet the collective memory of Jewish leaders here ? of the stories their grandparents told of arriving in this remote land to build a vibrant Jewish enclave ? remains fresh. And the ones who feel the links to the past deep in their bones, as Jaime Jruz, 65, passionately puts it, say they owe a debt to their ancestors to keep the old traditions alive.
?This is a story we have to treasure, that we have to keep alive for our grandchildren,? Jruz, one of the last of the Jewish gauchos, or cowboys, said on the same farm his grandfather first settled. ?I cannot abandon this knowing the sacrifices they made.?
Today, the story of their arrival in Argentina?s outback is all but a footnote in the history of the Jewish diaspora. But in the 1890s, as whole towns of East European and Russian Jews began packing, the offers of a new life in the New World seemed like providence.
With escalating czarist pogroms against Jews a foreshadowing of the calamities to come, the logical promised land was not Palestine but the wide-open spaces in the Americas ? at least in the mind of an eccentric German-Jewish philanthropist and railroad financier named Baron Maurice de Hirsch.
So at the same time as the father of modern Zionism, Theodor Herzl, was marshaling support for a Jewish state, Hirsch was busily buying up huge tracts of land in the United States, Canada and Brazil. His Jewish Colonization Association, though, had its greatest success here, acquiring a a swath of farmland equivalent in size to Delaware and parceling out plots to 50,000 immigrant Jews over four decades.
Sparsely populated Argentina, for its part, wanted the new immigrants, assigning Argentine agents in Russia the job of ?promoting the Israelite immigration from the Russian Empire,? as recounted in an 1881 presidential degree.
They came en masse here to Entre Rios province in the country?s northeast starting in 1894, men in black hats and long beards, women holding newborns, the families lugging trunks of belongings.
Each family took over a 123-acre plot, started to pay off the land over 20 years and began to farm and raise cattle. The last group came in 1936, German Jewish families narrowly escaping extermination to start a colony called Avigdor.
What they built here was a sort of Argentine Borscht Belt, 16 colonies encompassing dozens of towns where residents spoke Yiddish, introduced East European-style agricultural cooperatives and laid out hamlets not unlike the shtetls that the immigrants had called home back in Russia, said Osvaldo Quiroga, a Catholic who runs a small museum and is considered an expert.
Source: http://feeds.washingtonpost.com/click.phdo?i=f9e4d363e50ef1da83bc86e790a33de4
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