On This Day in Jewish History: August 14th, 1889

https://www.instagram.com/p/CD4c1STF7_F/

#onthisday, 130 Jewish families from Russia arrive in Buenos Aires August 14th, 1889 and essentially kickstart the Jewish community of the South American nation.

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Russian Jewry was fleeing due to the high volume of antisemitism and persecution in the Russian Empire – at both the hands of the government and their fellow citizens. While many moved to the US, others found refuge in places like Argentina.

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In the 16th and 17th centuries, Crypto-Jews settled in Buenos Aires, running away from the reach of the Inquisition. In the next century, Buenos Aires developed into a commercial port city. But, there were no traces of Jews living openly as Jews under Spanish rule in 1810.

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73 years later, Buenos Aires welcomed 130 Jewish families seeking a new home. No longer under Spanish rule and the prospect of reduced antisemitism attracted them to create a home in this country.

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The open-door policy of Argentina made living there a hub for Jews of Eastern European descent. While these 824 Russian Jews were not the first Jews to arrive in Argentina, they were the first to establish a free Jewish agricultural settlement in South America.

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The country’s various Jewish organizations united to form the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina (AMIA) and would evolve into one of Argentina’s central Jewish institutions and community centers. As mentioned on our post on July 18th, this was the organization directly targeted by Iranian terrorists, with complicity from the Argentinian government, that took 85 lives in 1994.

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The Jewish community began to urbanize quickly, and later, decades after WW2, there were few signs left of the country’s once-flourishing Jewish agricultural community.

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Today, approximately 250,000 Jews live across Argentina. The country is host to the largest Jewish community in Latin America and the sixth-largest Jewish community in the world.

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Text Source: https://avotaynuonline.com/2007/07/immigrants-to-argentina-listed-as-baron-de-hirsch-colonists-by-paul-armony/

Image Source: https://www.worldjewishcongress.org/en/news/this-week-in-jewish-history–130-jewish-families-arrived-in-buenos-aires-8-3-2020

✍: @_tikvah

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