Together yet Apart: Israel
and Argentine Jews
Raanan Rein, Tel Aviv University
Shalom, buenas tardes and good afternoon to you all. I am truly honored by the
invitation to deliver this lecture. At first, I was going to devote my talk
to a well defined and focused topic, that is the triangular relationship between
Israel, Argentina, and Argentine Jews. However, I decided that this keynote
address was an appropriate platform for sharing with you some of my thoughts
regarding several of the unquestioned assumptions behind much of the research
that has been done so far on Latin American Jews. I do not pretend to offer
a new paradigm, although I do believe that it is time to encourage new approaches
to Latin American Jewish studies. Several of these unchallenged assumptions
that I will list in a couple of minutes came to my mind as someone who was trained
as a historian of Latin America and not as a historian of the Jewish people.
I hope that by bringing them up for discussion and relating some of them to
my own research, I will provoke a debate that will continue even after my talk,
during dinner, or in the corridors.
Latin American Jewish studies have advanced tremendously in the last two decades.
In the mid-1990s, Jeffrey Lesser could still observe critically, in the preface
to his Welcoming the Undesirables: Brazil and the Jewish Question, that Latin
American historians tended to view the study of Jews as part of Jewish history,
while Jewish historians tended “to lump all but the largest numerical
[Jewish] communities into the category of 'exotica,' and thus not worthy of
careful study.” Less than a decade later, it seems that studying the Jewish
experience in this continent is no longer considered exotic.
Much innovative research in this field is the work of scholars who were trained
as historians of Latin America. They look at these communities first and foremost
as Latin Americans of Jewish origins, part of the ethnic and cultural mosaics,
or kaleidoscopes, that constitute Latin American societies, with their hybrid
and complex identities. They do not tend to look at the members of these communities
as Jews who just happen to live in Latin America. Nor are their studies limited
exclusively to the organized Jewish community and its institutional life. Instead,
the dynamics of the relations between Jews and non-Jews is explored in a broader
way. Research now points to the major role played by Jews in the economic, social,
cultural and political life in their respective countries, as well as to what
the experience of Jewish minorities in Latin America reveals about other immigrant
and ethnic groups, and about the overall character of Latin American societies.
From this comparative standpoint, several issues which once seemed unique to
Jews and to the attitude of the political authorities towards Jews appear to
be not so.
From this brief introduction, some of you might have already guessed at least
several of the ten commonly held and inter-related assumptions that I will proceed
to present:
1. The idea that Jews are a minority unlike other minorities, therefore when
one studies the history of Argentine Jews or Brazilian Jews, one should be familiar
with the history of Jews in South Africa or Australia, or any other place, instead
of studying the history of the Jewish minority in relation to the history of
other minorities such as Arabs, Poles, or Asians in the country of interest.
Most studies so far emphasize the notion of Jewish uniqueness and exceptionalism.
2. The idea that trans-national ethnicity is stronger than national identity.
Therefore, Jewish solidarity around the world and support for the Jewish state
constitute the main ingredients of the identity of Latin American Jews. However,
research by several scholars has indicated the primacy of national identity,
for instance, the fact that Argentine Jews have always struggled to be "unmistakably
Argentine", as Jorge Luis Borges put it in his 1940 introduction to Mester
de judería (Poems of Jewry), a collection of poetry by his friend Carlos
M. Grunberg.
3. Zionism in Latin America in general, and in Argentina in particular, has
been first and foremost about the state of Israel. It seems to me that there
is a continued misunderstanding of the nature of Zionism in Latin America, and
probably in other countries as well. Being Zionist in Argentina, for example,
often has had little to do with the State of Israel. More often, it has been
one of the strategies espoused by Jews in order to become Argentines. Like every
other immigrant community, Jews in Argentina needed to have their own Madre
Patria. Just as the Italians had Italy and the Spaniards had Spain, so Jews
had their own imagined Zion, or Israel. This brand of Zionism was about becoming
Argentine while staying Jewish, and not moving to Palestine. This was the primary
objective of very many Jews and formed part of their efforts to shape new identities
and make Argentina a home. I will return to this issue later, but let me add
an additional comment here: due to the conquest of the organized community by
Zionist political parties in the early 1950s, historiography has tended to devote
relatively little attention to non-Zionists in Argentina. Their experiences
and efforts to integrate themselves into Argentine society have remained on
the margins of the currently dominant or hegemonic narratives of Argentine Jewry.
4. As a Jewish state, Israel has a deep commitment to Diaspora Jews and therefore
its interests are always similar or complementary to the interests of Latin
American Jews wherever they might be. I will expand on this assumption shortly.
5. The great majority of Latin American Jews are affiliated to local Jewish
associations and frameworks. Therefore, there is little sense in wasting time
and energy in research on unaffiliated Jews. The term "Jewish community,"
that we tend to use when discussing one country or another, might in itself
be misleading, if it includes only those affiliated with Jewish organizations,
synagogues, social clubs, youth movements, etc. What about the other Jews, those
that normally constitute the majority in these countries? True, in a way it
is easier to research the history of Jews within Jewish organizations, but in
so doing, we are in fact ignoring the majority of Jews in these societies. Or,
to use the language of this conference, and of a similar one held at Tel Aviv
University a few days ago, I believe that one of our duties as historians is
to ensure a future for the past memories of those numerous Jews not affiliated
to the organized community. Documenting their life stories, and reclaiming the
memories of ordinary Jews that have so far been kept hidden from Latin American
Jewish historiography in general, and the Argentine one in particular, could
provide us with additional lessons on the nature of their respective societies
and on the role played by culture and community in historical processes.
6. Anti-Semitism in Latin America is strong and probably stronger than in other
regions of the world. This is what Haim Avni alluded to when he wrote of the
“overdeveloped focus of research energy [by scholars of Latin American
Jewry]: anti-Semitism”. Reading several of the books published on Anti-Semitism
in Latin America one might get the wrong impression that life for Jews in the
continent was unbearable, a continued nightmare.
7. Jews in Latin America are all white and rich. I will not deal with the issue
of color here and the question whether Jews were always considered white in
Latin American societies, but I would like to refer to the issue of social classes.
To my knowledge, scant research has been done on Argentine Jews of the second
half of the 20th century who belonged to the working class. Could it be that
they simply do not comply with our celebratory myth of the success of the Jews
who moved from Pale to Pampa and quite rapidly became a middle-class community?
True, this was the case with very many Argentine Jews, but certainly not all
of them. In a recent study I conducted on the second line of Peronist leadership,
I was surprised to discover that Jews played an important role in the organized
labor movement, and that in the two most important trade unions of the 1940s,
the Unión Ferroviaria and the Confederación de Empleados de Comercio,
one could find key figures such as Rafael Kogan and David Diskin, both of whom
became supporters of Perón. Yet, almost no-one seems to have been interested
in them so far.
8. Smaller in number, more traditionalist and less Zionist, Sephardi Jews are
not an important part of the story. Being a minority within a minority, their
history is supposedly less crucial for our understanding of the Jewish experience
in Latin America. Furthermore, as Mollie Lewis emphasized in her paper, scholars
have probably exaggerated in their descriptions of the religious and cultural
differences between Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews, as well as their lack of interaction.
9. Numerically larger communities can teach us more than smaller communities,
therefore research should be devoted primarily to the history and culture of
Argentinian, Brazilian and Mexican Jews. I believe that Leo Spitzer's Hotel
Bolivia has already proven how problematic this assumption is.
10. As far as gender issues are concerned, it seems that most Jewish women we
know about in Latin America of the 19th and 20th centuries were either prostitutes
or novelists. Although Jewish women have played fundamental roles in Argentina
and its Jewish life, still, as Sandra McGee Deutsch emphasized, "Argentine
Jewish women are virtually absent from the secondary historical sources. Studying
them is vital for its own sake, to recover the voices and tell the untold stories
of the unheard half of the Jewish population."
Clearly, recent works by Leo Spitzer, Jeffrey Lesser, Donna Guy, Sandra McGee
Deutsch, Adriana Brodsky, José Moya, Lawrence Bell, and Edna Aizenberg,
among others, have questioned several of these assumptions, but still, they
seem to inform too many studies.
For the past ten years or so, I have been studying the complex triangular relationship
between Israel, Argentina and Argentine Jews. In the course of this research,
I have emphasized, among other things, that Israel's interests were often at
odds with the interests of Argentine Jews; that while sometimes these interests
were complementary, at other times they were contradictory. Although the State
of Israel defined itself from the very beginning as a Jewish state and declared
its commitment to defending the interests of all Jews, the interests of Israeli
foreign policy were not always congruent with those of local Jewish communities.
The dynamics at each of these levels was different. Moshe Sharett, the first
foreign minister of Israel, met Argentine president Juan Domingo Perón
in 1953 and expressed his satisfaction at "the existence of a triangular
harmony: between the Argentine government and its Jewish citizens; between Argentine
Jews and Israel; and between the Argentine government and its Israeli counterpart."
In practice, however, the situation naturally was more complex.
Such an argument as to the existence of conflicting interests between Israel
and Latin American Jews would have been dismissed as trivial among scholars
devoted to Diaspora studies. However, my research has provoked many reactions
among scholars of Jewish History, and several of them were upset by what they
considered as my ignoring the uniqueness of the Jewish experience, pointing
an accusing finger towards the State of Israel, or staining the Zionist record
of Argentine Jews. In recent years, at a time that Israeli policies in the occupied
territories are being constantly criticized in most countries, it seems that
many Jewish historians are less willing to discuss issues which might, in one
way or another, question past Israeli policies or the conflicted relationship
between Israel and the Jewish Diaspora.
Since the 1940s, we can distinguish four major historical junctures in which
the interests of Israel and those of Argentine Jews were not necessarily complementary:
during the regime of the populist president Juan Perón (1946-1955); following
the kidnapping of Nazi war criminal Adolph Eichmann in Argentina by agents of
the Mossad in May 1960; during the brutal military dictatorship that ruled the
country in the years 1976-1983; and following the recent economic crisis, which
was accelerated by the political turmoil of December 2001 and the popular revolt
that ousted president Fernando de la Rúa. These four historical junctures
illustrate the fact that Israel’s interests and those of Argentine Jews
were occasionally congruent, but certainly not always. Israel worked in various
ways to assist the local Jewish community, and its embassy in Buenos Aires played
a central role in the life of the organized community and the development of
its policy. When all was said and done, however, Israel operated as a sovereign
country and sought to advance specific interests of its own that did not always
accord with Argentine Jews’ struggle for equal rights and integration.
The view that saw Israel as the core of the entire Jewish world dictated a certain
order of priorities for the makers of Israeli foreign policy, even at the expense
of specific Jewish communities. In the limited time at my disposal, I will only
make a few remarks about each of these crossroads. During the discussion, we
will be able to expand on any of them.
Recent scholarship has demonstrated that while president Perón succeeded
in cultivating close relations with the state of Israel, he failed in his attempt
to mobilize any significant support in the Jewish street. The Jews of Argentina
remained hostile to Perón, despite his many efforts to win their hearts.
All Perón’s attempts to win Argentine Jews over —for example,
by setting up a Peronist Jewish organization (the Organización Israelita
Argentina / OIA)—were to no avail. In the aftermath of World War II, as
the extent of the Jewish Holocaust in Europe became clear, Argentine Jews, who
were mostly of Eastern and Central European origin, were understandably wary
of a government that in some respects resembled the defeated Axis regimes. The
support Perón had received from nationalist and anti-Semitic groups at
the beginning of his career, and the alliance he forged with the Catholic Church
in the second half of the 1940s, only reinforced their suspicions. The political
identity (generally liberal or left-wing) and class identity (primarily middle-class)
of many Jews disposed them to remain aloof from a regime that was developing
increasingly authoritarian tendencies and that, moreover, was identified with
benefits for the working class.
Perón was well aware that many observers at home and abroad considered
his relations with the Jews in his country as a kind of acid test of the character
of the regime. Therefore, he did his best to be friendly towards the Jewish
community, and in their speeches, both Juan Perón and Eva Perón
(Evita) always strongly rejected anti-Semitism.
Interestingly enough, Perón saw no incompatibility between Argentine
Jews’ loyalty to their country and their support for Israel, which he
considered their “mother country,” just as every other immigrant
group in Argentina had a similar “national homeland.” In the same
way that the Italians maintained their connection to Italy and the “Gallegos”
maintained theirs to Spain, it was natural that the Jews should do the same
with their country. In short, Perón’s statements fully legitimized
the Argentine Jewish community’s open identification with Zionism and
the state of Israel. During Perón’s regime, this double bond that
Argentine Jews felt was not considered indicative of “dual loyalties,”
as it would be in the 1960s, following the kidnapping of Adolf Eichmann. In
conversations with Yaacov Tsur, Israel's representative in Buenos Aires, officials
of the Argentine administration used the phrase “the Israelite community,”
where the Spanish word israelita was applicable to both Jews and Israelis. On
one occasion Perón even declared that “an Argentine Jew who does
not help Israel is not a good Argentine.”
Here I would like to emphasize again the comparative perspective. One should
not forget the importance of ethnicity itself as a tool for political mobilization
in Perón’s “New Argentina.” Indeed, Jews were not the
only ethnic group that Perón tried to recruit as a community, and his
cultivation of Jewish national sentiment in the form of Zionism to curry Jewish
political favor actually mirrored his actions towards Argentines of Italian,
Spanish, German, and Arab descent as well.
In contrast to the hostility felt by many Argentine Jews towards Perón,
Argentina’s relations with the state of Israel were excellent during this
period. This was reflected in various ways, including a series of declarations
supporting Israel and Zionism, a commercial treaty of great importance for Israel,
a series of reciprocal visits, and a cultural agreement.
Perón understood that his efforts to enlist the support of the Jewish
community would require him to cultivate relations with the state of Israel.
Even more important, he believed that good relations with Israel would help
improve Argentina’s relations with the US. Perón – like any
other Argentine president since the end of World War II, including the current
president, Nestor Kirchner -- had excessive faith in the influence that North
American Jews exerted over the media, politicians, and organized labor, and
hoped that they would use that influence to change the way in which the US public
and Washington decision-makers saw Argentina. Jewish and Israeli representatives
naturally had an interest in fostering that belief. This is but one example
of how stereotypes that function at one level as signifiers of otherness and
a mechanism of exclusion can, at another level, promote acceptance and check
anti-Semitism.
Thus, both domestic political considerations and foreign-policy aims concerning
Argentina’s international status and its image in Western public opinion
led Perón to parade his friendly attitude towards Israel frequently,
from the time relations between the two states were established in May 1949
until the collapse of his regime in September 1955.
Yet the good relations that the Israeli ambassador prudently fostered with the
Peronist authorities and the OIA gave rise to certain uneasiness among some
of the leaders of the organized Jewish community. On one occasion, a delegation
of Jewish representatives arrived to scold him for agreeing to participate in
an OIA-sponsored assembly at which Perón was to be present. “One
after the other the heads of the community advised me not to get too close to
Perón, to keep a distance from the person who to them embodied reaction
and fascism, and [that] friendly though he might seem to the Jewish community,
there was no doubt that he was an anti-Semite.” Tsur responded to such
arguments by saying:
For me as representative of a foreign country, General Perón is not the
head of the Peronist Party, but the president of the country, to whom I owe
respect, and it is not my affair to criticize what he does. Attending a party
in Perón’s honor is not appearing in a Peronist act or even deciding
between him and his political opponents, but showing respect for the man who
heads the state in which the legation operates.
When Perón was ousted in September 1955, many Argentine Jews rejoiced,
while Israel had no reason to celebrate.
The disparity between Israel’s interests and those of Argentine Jews was
even more notable during the presidency of Arturo Frondizi, leader of the centrist
Radical Party, whose democratic credentials and sympathy for the Jewish minority
were never in doubt. Frondizi’s victory in 1958 had been welcomed by both
the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires and the leaders of the local Jewish community.
And he had not lived in the presidential palace for long before their expectations
appeared to have been justified. The Jews of Argentina felt a growing sense
of security and well-being, and relations between Jerusalem and Buenos Aires
grew closer.
In 1960, Israelis embarked on a series of gestures honoring the approaching
150th anniversary of Argentine independence. A decision was made to send a large
delegation of dignitaries to Buenos Aires to take part in the celebrations that
were scheduled to culminate on 25 May. The delegation was headed by Abba Eban,
then a minister without portfolio. It was during these celebrations that Adolf
Eichmann, considered the mastermind of Hitler's "Final Solution,"
was kidnapped by Israeli Mossad agents.
I will not discuss here the details of the diplomatic crisis between the two
countries, following the violation of Argentine sovereignty by supposed "Jewish
volunteers". The important point I would like to make is that by the beginning
of August, that is in a matter of 8 weeks, the storm had passed. As President
Frondizi stressed, the Argentines had “decided to wipe out the incident,
and he emphasized in particular economic motives connected with the development
of the state. He already sensed a certain aloofness towards Argentina on the
part of wealthy Jews around the world, and such an aloofness might disrupt his
plans.”
Although Argentina’s relations with Israel returned relatively quickly
to their normal course, this was not the case with the feelings and situation
of Argentine Jews, whose number at the time was estimated at more than 300,000.
The Jews’ personal sense of security had been undermined. The Argentine
Jewish community became the target of a wave of anti-Semitic terror and nationalist
attacks that, among other things, did their best to cast doubt on the Jewish
citizens’ loyalty to the Argentine Republic.
Argentine Jews had experienced mixed feelings when they read that the Nazi criminal
Adolf Eichmann had in fact been captured in their country —happiness and
satisfaction that Eichmann had been caught, interlaced with strong anxiety about
how the Argentine government and public opinion were likely to react towards
Israel and the local Jewish community. In fact, Argentine Jews were both pulled
and pressured by Argentine nationalism and by transnational Jewish political
and cultural links to Israel. None of the Jewish organizations in Argentina
made any public criticism of the kidnapping of Eichmann, and some Jewish public
figures even helped resolve the crisis in the relations between the two countries.
Nonetheless, certain circles in the Jewish community were definitely uncomfortable
with the way Israel had carried out its operation. Historiography, especially
that written by Zionist scholars, preferred to ignore such reactions. According
to a representative of the American Jewish Committee in Buenos Aires, the leaders
of the community came close to panic in the first days after Eichmann’s
capture was reported. They feared that tension between Israel and Argentina
would affect the local Jewish community: that there would be direct anti-Semitic
attacks and Argentine Jews would be accused of dual loyalty, or greater loyalty
to Israel than to their own country – and they were not mistaken.
At the height of the crisis, the Ha’aretz daily correspondent in Buenos
Aires wrote even more forthrightly about a certain uneasiness among Argentine
Jews due to the violation of their country's sovereignty and the "lack
of understanding" shown by the government of Israel. As Argentine Jews,
they considered themselves insulted by the snub to their country. Various Jewish
leaders, like the former ambassador to Israel, Gregorio Topolevsky, initially
expressed the view that Eichmann should be returned to Argentina. Dr. Mario
Schteingart, president of the Argentine Jewish Institute, was not the only person
to believe that it would be better for both Israel and the Jews of Argentina
if an international court, rather than an Israeli one, were appointed to try
Eichmann.
The two years between Eichmann’s kidnapping in May 1960 and his execution
in June 1962 were the hardest that the Jews of Argentina had known since the
pogrom of the “Semana Trágica” in January 1919. Certain Argentine
nationalist groups, spearheaded by the extreme right-wing organization Movimiento
Nacionalista Tacuara, sought to exploit Eichmann’s kidnapping and trial
and the infringement of Argentine sovereignty in order to attack the Jews in
their country. Various nationalist publications also began to point accusing
fingers at Argentine Jews. Notable among them were El Pampero, Cabildo, and
Azul y Blanco. All these periodicals frequently asserted that Jews bore no loyalty
to Argentina, or that their divided loyalties made them support Israel in moments
of crisis instead of remaining faithful to the Argentine Republic, whose sovereignty
had been violated by the Zionists.
Nationalist hostility was not confined to propaganda against the “Jewish
fifth column” in the form of articles, posters, and anti-Semitic slogans
and swastikas painted on the walls of buildings in Jewish neighborhoods, but
encompassed actual violence: vandalism against Jewish institutions and attacks
on Jewish schoolchildren and university students. The most serious incident
was an assault on a 19-year-old student by the name of Graciela Sirota. Sirota
was kidnapped in the street while waiting for a bus to the University of Buenos
Aires. A gray car containing three young men stopped beside her, whereupon one
of the men got out, clubbed her, and pulled her into the car. They took her
to a place where she was beaten and brutally tortured; her assailants burned
different parts of her body with lighted cigarettes and tattooed a swastika
on her chest. “This is in revenge for Eichmann,” the kidnappers
told her.
The Jewish community of Argentina was galvanized into angry, firm, and unified
action by the appalling attack on Graciela Sirota and police indifference to
violent acts committed against Jews. On 28 June, 1962, a commercial strike of
several hours was declared throughout the Republic, and many businesses bore
signs reading “Closed in protest over Nazi aggression in Argentina.”
Most of the Jews in Buenos Aires left their workplaces and closed their shops.
Although the Jewish protest had been anticipated, the strike turned into an
impressive show of strength, since, to the surprise of the Jewish leaders themselves,
the response extended far beyond the limits of the organized Jewish community.
In contrast to Argentine Jews’ response to the upsurge of anti-Semitic
attacks following Eichmann’s execution, Israel maintained a cautious position
to avoid sabotaging the process of rehabilitating its relations with Argentina.
At a meeting of foreign-ministry officials attended by foreign minister, Golda
Meir, it was decided to avoid any Israeli initiative. Israeli diplomats were
told: “We are doubtful that our representatives need at this stage to
constitute a factor of direct pressure on the Argentine government, particularly
by attributing general responsibility to it for anti-Semitic incidents. It seems
better not to take any initiative […] We do not need to create the impression
that our representatives exercise direct influence on the response of public
opinion outside Argentina.” The fear was that, given the Argentine government’s
coolness towards Israel, “if we entered the controversy, the whole thing
would snowball in a direction neither side wanted to go.” Cynical observers
could claim that silence was the cheapest price the Jewish state could pay to
avoid damaging its relations with Argentina, which had only recently returned
to normal.
The triangular relations between Argentina, its local Jews and the State of
Israel during the dark years of the brutal military dictatorship of the 1970s
is a very controversial issue. The Inter-ministerial Commission that was established
in Israel, and the report it published a year ago, instead of putting an end
to the debate over Israel's behavior during those years, has only sharpened
it, encouraging more research on the subject, as was the case with Argentine
president, Carlos Menem, and his commission, the CEANA, which sparked a renewed
controversy over Argentine policies during World War II and the entry of Nazis
to Argentina following the defeat of the Third Reich. The forthcoming book of
memoirs written by retired general Itzhak Pundak, former envoy of the Jewish
Agency to Buenos Aires at that time, will surely contribute to the debate inaugurated
in 1990 with the publication of Marcel Zohar's book, Free my People to Hell.
Betrayal in Blue and White: Israel and Argentina: How the Jews Persecuted by
the Military were neglected. Written by a journalist, not a historian, and published
by a marginal press, this book was dismissed by many at the time as being of
little importance.
It is definitely too early to analyze this triangular relationship, particularly
since the Israeli foreign ministry has reneged from its earlier promise to give
researchers free access to the relevant documents. Therefore, let me just remind
all of us that the number of missing and presumably assassinated individuals
in Argentina in those years is nearly 9,000, according to conservative estimates,
and between 20-30,000 according to more radical estimates. The victims included
many people of Jewish background: 1,300 disappeared, in addition to many others
who were persecuted in the country or went into exile. Israel’s ties to
this dictatorship and its arms sales to the Argentine army underscore a recurring
moral dilemma in Israeli foreign policy. Could Israel have done more to defend
human rights in Argentina in general, and to save Jewish lives in particular?
Did the military-industrial establishment impose its priorities on Israel's
diplomacy in this instance as well as in many previous cases?
In most of my interviews with former Israeli diplomats, they rejected such questions
and used the Timerman case to support their claim that Israel did its utmost
to save Argentine Jews. Yet while, on the one hand, the release of the Argentine
Jewish journalist and publisher serves to demonstrate Israel's positive role
in defending the cause of human rights in those years, it could well be that
the focus on Timerman was also one of the factors that led to the neglect of
numerous other Jews that were less well known, who were indeed prisoners without
a name and whose cells indeed had no number. Furthermore, Israeli officials
have always tended to downplay the contribution of the Carter administration
and various Jewish organizations, trying to appropriate for themselves the achievement
of Timerman's release.
* And finally, I would like to say a few words about the recent economic crisis
in Argentina. This crisis has had a devastating effect on the middle sectors
in this country. The Jews, most of whom belonged to these sectors, were hard
hit. For the first time in the history of this important community, its leadership
had to confront the widespread phenomenon of Jewish poverty. Jewish organizations
the world over were alarmed by the news of the severe situation. Relief efforts,
however, have exposed a different order of priorities for the State of Israel,
on the one hand, and the Jewish Diaspora, on the other. While Israel has limited
most of its efforts to encouraging mass immigration and offered generous help
to those willing to make “aliya,” the American Jewish Distribution
Committee has focused on providing relief to the estimated 200,000 Argentine
Jews who remain there. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon tried to convince American
Jews to finance immigration to Israel: “The Jewish community in Argentina
wants to immigrate to Israel, but it is [economically] hard for them…
[T]hey need our help and they need your help… Help us to save this community
and bring them to Israel.” Michael Schneider, the Joint's executive vice
president, put forth a different perspective: “We must step up aliya,
but we must also try to do the maximum to preserve the community as a community.
We don’t want to see a complete meltdown of this once populous and very
vital society.”
Several American philanthropists criticized Israel for “trying to take
advantage of the distress of Argentine Jews in order to encourage aliya.”
They emphasized that the situation in Argentina was critical and therefore money
should be raised for relief, and distributed among all needy Jews, not just
those considering immigration: “The immediate and primary goal is not
to help them immigrate to Israel, but save them from starvation.”
This conflict, pitting one camp that validates Jewish life in the Diaspora against
another that views immigration to Israel as history’s solution to Jewish
distress, is not new, but constitutes a historical clash. In informal talks,
some Argentine Jews spoke of the "betrayal" of Israel and its instrumental
approach to the Diaspora.
Instead of making concluding remarks, I would now like to return to my initial
list of unquestioned assumptions. I do not pretend to say that these assumptions
are groundless or baseless, but I believe that we should re-examine them again
and again in order to be able to advance our research in ways that deal with
the history and experience of the majority of Jews, not just with the history
of affiliated, middle class, Zionist, Ashkenazi males. I know that several studies
in the past decade have challenged one or more of these assumptions. Of course,
I cannot mention all of them here, though some were written by people attending
this conference. Still, these tacit assumptions underlie most research on the
history of Jews in Latin America and we should question them over and over,
all the more so within the framework of LAJSA.