By Michele Alperin
Special to The Jewish State

A new synagogue in the Belgrano barrio of Buenos Aires may well serve as a metaphor for Jewish life in Argentina.

The street entrance is relatively nondescript, but you know it’s a shul because of the steel rods that keep potential car bombs at arm’s length. In fact, every Jewish institution in the country is blockaded with concrete or steel.

Not only is Templo Amijai protected from the outside, but its entire design radiates security. So that the sanctuary would be at a far remove from the street, the synagogue is set in a large courtyard, mimicking the structure of the ancient Temple in Jerusalem—where the holy of holies is set in a courtyard (of which the Western Wall is one of the outside walls). Behind the entrance is a large, open space through which worshippers walk to reach the sanctuary.

Yet, despite the security precautions, the synagogue--which my daughter, Aliza, had attended with her host family earlier in the summer--was brimful of Jews on the Friday night we were there.

Aliza spent her entire summer in Argentina working on her Spanish, and my husband, son and I got a chance to go and visit her in August to travel. She lived in a Jewish home, volunteered at a Jewish home for the aged, and studied at a language school while there.

The synagogue, though Conservative, had a klezmer-type band accompanying the Kabbalat Shabbat service. The rabbi used many lively melodies and over the course of the evening managed to prod the reluctant Argentinians to join in. Surprising to us was that he included the matriarchs as well as the patriarchs in the Amidah, and he did a “one breath” Shema, where each word is held for the space of an entire breath, a spiritual practice out of the Jewish renewal movement. The rabbi also had the entire congregation standing, arm in arm, and singing together at the service’s close.

According to the mother of Aliza’s host family, the synagogue’s goal was to draw in young Argentinian Jews who had never been in a shul. And with this sample of the country’s shuls, you might say that Jewish life in Argentina is on the upswing.

Hebrew literacy seemed to be much higher among Argentinians we met than among our friends back home, attributable to the large percentage of people who have attended Jewish schools. According to www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org, Argentina has more than 70 Jewish educational institutions, including kindergartens, day schools, elementary and secondary schools, and more than 60 percent of Jewish Argentine youth attend one of these institutions.

But there is a sense is that the community is struggling. Over the last 30 years, the Jewish community, either by itself or together with the entire Argentinian society, has suffered serious setbacks.

The first was the period of the junta, from 1976 to 1983, when thousands of Argentnians (the low estimate is 9,000) literally disappeared. Of these, 1,000 were Jews (that means that Jews were 12 percent of the disappeared whereas they comprised only 1 percent of the population). The guide of our tour with traveljewish.com suggested this high percentage was related to the political activism of the Jewish population rather than to anti-Semitism. Allusions to that time are kept under wraps, but the mother in Aliza’s host family shared a harrowing story from her own life. We also discovered in one of the books we had brought along that the basement of what was now a gorgeous shopping mall (its ceilings painted with murals by famous artists) had been used by the military to interrogate prisoners during the junta.

According to an extensive history of the Jewish population of Argentina in www.geocities.com/bargfamily/argentina.html, the number of Jews peaked around 1960 at approximately 310,000, and then started to decrease as a result of assimilation as well as emigration, to Israel and to other countries for economic or political reasons.

In 1982, only 233,000 Jews remained.

The next trials of the Jewish community came in the 1990s, when the community experienced two major terrorist attacks, one the March 1992 bombing of the Israeli Embassy, killing 32 people, and the other the July 1994 bombing of the Jewish community center (AMIA) in Buenos Aires, killing 85 people and wounding over 200.

The bombing of the embassy, our guide Luz told us, was thought of as being specifically against the Jewish community. After the tragedy, the embassy moved downtown to an office building. What remains of the original building is a somber remnant, an empty concrete plaza up against the plastered wall (with some of its original elegant detail).

Two years later the bombing of AMIA—founded to administer Jewish cemeteries at the end of the nineteenth century, but eventually becoming the central Jewish institution and voice of the Jewish community—was taken as an attack on Argentinian society. AMIA was rebuilt (similarly to Amijai, the actual building is set back from its front wall—we couldn’t go in, because security was too tight), and the government has planted trees on both sides of that block, each with a plaque at its foot with the name of a terror victim.

The most recent crisis of Argentinian society was economic, and it extended from 1999 to 2002.

A friend and former Argentinian diplomat observed that during that period, most people moved down the social ladder, upper middle class moving to middle-middle and lower middle class becoming poor. Two Jewish-owned banks went under during this period. With them went their support for the Jewish community and its Bar Ilan Hebrew Argentine University, which is now closed. During the economic crisis, more than 10,000 Argentine Jews left, the majority making aliyah to Israel.

Even among the small number of Argentinians we got to know on our trip, several families had children who lived abroad. In Aliza’s host family, the older brother was a musician in Barcelona. An Argentinian we met in Princeton while she was on a postdoctoral fellowship left Argentina to join her sister in Israel when she couldn’t tolerate the overcrowded conditions in the state-supported universities.

The last evidence of emigrating children came from our own family in Argentina—people we found out about just a couple of days before we left for Argentina. It was a second cousin of my father’s; he was the son of one of five brothers, my grandmother’s first cousins, who immigrated to Argentina from Warsaw in the early 1930s. These cousins felt that Argentina was not a good place for young people to start careers—their own daughter and her Argentinian husband now live in Boise, Idaho, with the couple’s only grandchildren.

The history of a substantial Jewish population in Argentina extends over 150 years. Although some Jews arrived from Spain after the expulsion, the earliest substantial wave of Jewish immigration was from France and England in the 1860s; these Jews arrived in response to Argentina’s 1853 constitution, which declared the country open to every person of goodwill.

A second wave came in the 1890s, primarily from Poland and Russia. Our guide told us that Baron de Hirsh, after losing his only son, decided his heirs would be the needy in the Jewish community. Argentina was looking for immigrants and offering good prices for land, and he established the Jewish Colonization Association, which developed Jewish farming towns, one with the name Moises Ville. The Jews brought over by the society worked closely with the native criollas, developing a cooperative movement, something like a moshav in Israel.

In the 1930s, when Jews were trying to escape from Europe, Argentina’s government placed restrictions on immigration. The mother of Aliza’s host family told about her father, from Croatia, who came over on a ship that was docked in the port of Buenos Aires for two months and then sent back to Europe. Her father jumped off the ship, was picked up by fishing boats, and lived illegally in Argentina for a number of years.

Argentina is, as a country, a mix of contradictions, and Jews, like all Argentinians, have had to adjust to a volatile political and economic environment. On the one hand, they are still building new institutions, like Amijai and a new Jewish home for the elderly (in addition to one outside the city where my daughter volunteered). With upcoming elections, we noticed the names of at least two Jews running for political office. The mayor of Buenos Aires is also Jewish.

At the same time, all signs of Judaism are downplayed, with institutions almost camouflaged, trying to blend into the woodwork. Simply finding Jewish institutions in the phonebook (a habit of mine when I come to a new city) required a difficult Google search.

When we were in Tucuman, a town in the northwestern mountains, I read in a guidebook that the city hosted a small Jewish community. I studied the phonebook, and after a search, came up with something like Communidad Israelita.

Three of the four addresses listed under this heading were walkable and in the same neighborhood. The first two were day schools for different age groups. The last was a synagogue, closed up tight (it was a Sunday). We spoke to the guard, who told us approximately where the rabbi lived. We headed off, and, after help from someone on the street, located his house.

We knocked, and a woman appeared behind a slatted garage door. Since I don’t speak Spanish, I asked her if she spoke Hebrew, which she did. She never opened the door, and I felt through the whole conversation that she just wanted us to disappear. I thought this odd, naively expecting a hand of friendship from a fellow Jew, but then figured her coldness might simply be the paranoia of a beleaguered community. Given the experience of the last 30 years of both Argentina and its Jewish community, I respect that paranoia.