Are the Jews of Argentina Disappearing?
Daniel J. Elazar
For two decades Argentinian Jewry has been portrayed as a
dying community. First there was the collapse of the community's
cooperative banking system in the 1960s. Then the
disproportionate impact of right-wing counter-terror on the
Jewish community. That was followed by a general sense of
decline in the commitment of individual Jews to communal
institutions as reflected in lower turnout in community elections
and less involvement in communal activities other than the sports
clubs which were refuges for Jews but not strongholds of
Jewishness.
Then in the 1970s came the demographic issue. A Tel Aviv
University study of Argentinian Jewry revealed that accepted
estimates of half a million Jews in the country were gross
exaggerations. Subsequent studies by the Hebrew University
demographers dropped the number of Jews to below 300,000,
initially 265,000 and most recently less than 235,000, indicating
that assimilation and emigration were taking a drastic toll. For
most of the Jewish world the verdict was that we are witnessing
the effective end of a community once viewed as a model of
successful Jewish communal life in the diaspora.
This winter's recent visit to Argentina has left me with the
belief that the obituary is premature. The problems of
Argentinian Jewry are real enough, whether they are the common
problems of assimilation and acculturation shared by all the
diaspora or whether they are problems distinctive to the
Argentinian situation. But that is not the whole story. My
first surprise was with regard to the demographic situation.
True, it was not entirely a surprise since I had earlier come to
the conclusion that proper scientific caution had led the
demographers to somewhat underestimate the number of Jews in
Argentina. But there I discovered that the Vaad HaKehilot, the
federation of Jewish communities, had begun to conduct sample
censuses of its own in smaller provincial communities and in the
two just completed they had discovered significantly larger
numbers of Jews than they had hitherto estimated. If future
censuses of this kind follow the same pattern, then we will have
to substantially revise our present estimates upward.
My next surprise was to find that Hebrew was still more
widespread as the language of the Jewish leadership than in any
other diaspora community that I know. I would not like to
suggest that it is the common Jewish language in Argentina but it
was clearly easier for me to speak Hebrew than English with many
of the people that I met. Less surprising but still pleasing was
to note that although the old Eastern European-originated
institutions of the community have indeed declined, the community
is regrouping around others.
Particularly notable in this respect is the revival among the
Sephardic Argentinian Jewry. The Sephardim had always been able
to better accommodate their Jewishness with integration into
larger Argentinian society since they came from similarly
Mediterranean civilizations. Nevertheless, their Jewish ways
remained private, confined to their homes and synagogues.
Now the Sephardim are undergoing something of a Jewish
renaissance, expanding their institutions and most especially
their day schools, and undergoing a religious revival as well.
In all of this they are helped by the fact that their
institutions have more money at their disposal (at least per
capita) than those of the Ashkenazi community. The Ashkenazim
are still suffering from the failure of their cooperative banks ,
while the Sephardic Banco de Mayo survived and has subsequently
flourished so that it can provide substantial funding and credit
for community projects. In addition, the younger generation of
Sephardim is more likely to continue in the family business than
is the case among the Ashkenazim, where the younger generation
tends to go into academic life or the professions, further
reducing the disposable wealth that can be tapped for communal
purposes.
In general, Jewish religious life in Argentina has become
more important. Originally an almost totally secular community
with an absolute minimum of traditional Orthodox institutions,
maintained principally for appearances sake, today an increasing
number of Argentinian Jews are finding out what Jews in other
diasporas have discovered, that surviving as Jews requires some
kind of religious identification and expression. A leader in
this revival has been the Conservative movement, an import from
the United States that, through the excellent work of Rabbi
Marshall Meyer, was successfully transplanted and adapted to the
Argentinian scene. His original Conservative congregation has
grown in to a small network of congregations, a rabbinical
seminary, teachers institute, publications program, summer Camp
Ramah, and a wide variety of programs attracting thousands of
Argentinian Jews. Indeed the rabbinical seminary has become the
principal source of rabbis for other Latin American Jewish
communities as well.
More recently the haredi phenomenon has reached Argentina as
well. Ultra-Orthodox Jews from Habad to old Agudat Israel have
entered the life of Argentinian Jewry, founding yeshivot and
other institutions and in general moving a segment of the
community to ultra-Orthodoxy, an utterly new experience in
Argentinian Jewish history. In Buenos Aires the ultra-Orthodox
have ensconced themselves in the principal Sephardic neighborhood
and are both influencing some of the Sephardim and clashing with
others over their particularly dogmatic interpretation of
Judaism.
Another sign of the new-found energy among Argentinian Jews
was to be found at the meeting of the Latin American Jewish
Studies Association. That organization, founded originally by
North Americans, led by Dr. Judith Laiken Elkin of Michigan, the
organization's driving force, could not even meet in Latin
America until its fifth conference. This year for the first time
its meeting was held outside of the United States, in Buenos
Aires with the co-sponsorship of the AMIA, the umbrella
organization or kehilla of Buenos Aires. Even more impressive
were the number of young Latin American and particularly
Argentinian scholars who presented papers at the meeting, in many
cases based upon field research. In other words, Argentinian
Jewry is becoming sufficiently mature to begin to examine itself
through accepted scientific methods and sufficiently important in
the eyes of its younger generation to be considered worth
examining. In our complex world a community that is not studied
cannot be understood and any phenomenon that does not attract
scholarly inquiry is ipso facto unimportant. Thus the new
strength of LAJSA is another sign that Argentinian Jewry has
entered a new stage in its development.
None of this is to suggest that Argentinian Jewry is not
undergoing all the pangs of assimilation or confronting all the
elements of anti-Semitism, usually discussed in describing it.
What is important to note is that there is another side to the
story as well. As always, we have a community of Jews living on
the razor's edge, showing signs of both growth and decline.
Equally important, no longer is Argentinian Jewry simply a
Zionist or Israeli colony. Today it is moving toward a situation
where its voice could also be heard in the councils of world
Jewry and it will have something to contribute.
