In 1881, after the murder of Czar Alexander II, the new Czar, Alexander III, appointed Count Nikolai Pavlovich Ignatiev as interior minister and charged him with solving the so-called “Jewish problem.” Accordingly, Ignatiev initiated a policy to persecute Jews and organized more than 100 pogroms. The Jews began to think immediately of immigrating to other countries, and approximately 3 million Jews (out of a total of 5 million), left Russia before World War I began in 1914.

The primary destinations were:

• England (also seen as a first step to North America)
• North America, primarily the United States
• Palestine (then ruled by the Ottoman Empire). Many immigrants were rejected by Ottoman custom officers and returned to Istanbul, where they lived in poor conditions, seeking help from various international Jewish organizations.
• Argentina, Brazil and other Latin American countries
• South Africa, Australia and Western Europe

The many pogroms of 1881 attracted attention worldwide and motivated the leaders of two countries to offer help to Russian Jews. One, the former president of the Dominican Republic, General Gregorio Luperon, sent a letter to Charles Netter, President of the Alliance Israelite Universelle (AIU). Due to Netter=s death, Luperon received no reply. The AIU, at that time the first Jewish Organization in the world in defense of Jews, was founded in 1860 by Adolph Cremieux, Charles Netter and other important wealthy Jews. The other leader, Argentina=s President General Julio Argentino Roca, signed a decree on August 6, 1881, to promote Russian Jewish immigration to Argentina. Popular opinion opposed Jewish immigration; however, and many anti-Semitic journalists wrote against it. At this time, approximately 1,200 Jews lived in Argentina, many of them of Sephardic origin; the Ashkenazim were from Germany, France, England and the United States. A very few had come from Eastern Europe, principally Romania.

Nothing significant occurred until 1887–88, when a delegation of Jews from Kamenetz Podolsk, Russia, visited Paris seeking help to immigrate anyplace. After initial failure to obtain assistance, someone told Lazar Kauffman, the delegation=s chief, that Argentina welcomed Jewish immigration and that the country=s government provided help, including boat fare, initial housing and assistance in obtaining work.

Kauffman visited the Argentine consulate, where an officer for immigration sold him several plots of land 50 kilometers (32 miles) from Buenos Aires, near the newly built city of La Plata, capital of the province of Buenos Aires. He paid a deposit and returned home. Kauffman knew little about Argentina, except that it was in South America, but he was happy to return home with good news for his fellows. As a result, more than 130 families made plans to immigrate to distant Argentina, but many were afraid to travel there because it was known that Argentina was the paradise of prostitution organized by Jewish t=main that used Jewish women as slave prostitutes. Eventually, 120 families, comprising 813 individuals, made the trip. Before their departure, a delegation again visited Paris, met with the chief rabbi and asked his opinion about making the journey. The rabbi gave them good hope, and the group then traveled to Berlin, Hamburg and, at last, Bremen, from where the ship Weser departed for Argentina in July 1889.

Baron de Hirsch

The immigrants traveled by train to reach Germany. To save 50 percent of the cost of the fare, they claimed to be arriving as temporary workers. The fraud was discovered, however, and the immigrants jailed and required to pay large fines. After the intervention of the Jewish community of Krakow, only the heads of the delegation were sentenced to a year in jail.

August 14, 1889, the date that the Weser arrived in Buenos Aires, is considered to be the date of the first organized Jewish immigration in Argentina. A year earlier, in 1888, eight Russian families had come to Argentina with the help of the AIU in Paris.

When the Weser arrived in Buenos Aires, the immigrants received a distinctly bad welcome. First, immigration officer Lix Klett denied them permission to leave the boat, because he did not like their clothing or the look of the men. Klett wanted to return them to Russia, but the Argentine newspapers objected strongly, and Klett was obliged to accept the immigrants and house them in an immigrant hotel. Secondly, the land they had purchased in Paris no longer was available. Because of the two-year delay and a sharp increase in prices, land owner Rafael Hernandez, an important politician, had resold the land. He reimbursed the funds, minus the agent=s commission and other expenses, leaving the immigrants with nothing. The travelers then had no land or money.

During their hotel stay, many families left the group and settled in Buenos Aires or other cities around the country. Of the original 120 families, only 50 families remained. Buenos Aires already had a Jewish community with a rabbi and a synagogue, Israelite Community of Republic of Argentina (CIRA). Rabbi Henry Joseph, an English businessman, contacted the immigrants and offered to help. He introduced them to Pedro Palacios, a lawyer and landowner in the province of Santa Fe, where the new railroad to Tucuman had opened a station named Palacios on his land. Palacios earlier had sold land in the area to Italians from Piedmont, and he sold land to the immigrants led by Rabbi Aaron Goldman (at an exceedingly high price, with very good conditions for him and very poor conditions for the buyers).

Palacios put the immigrants in a railroad car and transported them to Palacios Station. The train returned to Buenos Aires, but the 50 families remained behind, alone, living in a railroad car without food or water, but with the friendship of the gauchos (cowboys). Because the immigrants were Orthodox Jews who would not eat treif (non-kosher food), they refused the gift of cow=s meat offered by the gauchos and went hungry. They ate only hard galletas marineras (sailor cookies) that had to be soaked in water until soft enough to eat. In this terrible situation, many children fell sick, perhaps with typhus, and 62 people died. With no cemetery and no coffins, the bodies were buried inside kerosene cans. These “coffins” were moved to the new Moisesville Cemetery when it opened in September 1891, the first Jewish cemetery in Argentina.

Fortunately, the group was visited by Dr. Wilheim Lowenthal, who was in Argentina to see sanitary conditions in other areas at the invitation of the Argentine government. AUI officials in Paris had instructed Lowenthal to check on these people. When he went to Palacios and learned of their terrible situation, he reported back to the authorities, who, in turn, demanded that Pedro Palacios provide help. Palacios delegated the job to his brother, who moved the immigrants 30 kilometers from Palacios to a place in the middle of wild vegetation, saying, “Here is your land” and asking if they wanted to name the place. In Yiddish, Rabbi Goldman replied, “We are again in the time of Moses and the Exodus. This is our new promised land, so will we name it Moses Shtetl (village).” Translated into French, the name became Moises Ville or Moisesville. This was the first Jewish city founded in the Americas at the same time that Rishon le Zion was founded in Eretz Israel by Baron Rothschild.

Lowenthal returned to Paris and reported to the AIU that Argentina was a good place for Russian Jewish immigrants. The AIU sent the report to Baron Maurice de Hirsch, who decided to accept the idea and hired Dr. Lowenthal to return to Argentina to buy land.

Some years earlier, Baron de Hirsch, wishing to create a chain of schools for Jews in Russia, offered Ignatiev a grant to obtain official support for the plan. But Ignatiev imposed conditions that Baron de Hirsch found unacceptable, and the project was dropped. Baron de Hirsch saw Lowenthal=s proposal as a new way to help Jews emigrate from Russia to safer places, and thus he founded the Jewish Colonization Association (JCA) and began to select Russian emigrants to settle in new colonies in Argentina.

The first two groups of immigrants sailed on the Lisabon (232 persons) and the Tijuca or Tokio (334 persons). Both ships arrived in August 1891, with passengers heading for a new colony named Mauricio (for de Hirsch) in Algarrobos, near Carlos Casares, 310 kilometers from the city of Buenos Aires. A third group was chosen in Istanbul, where several thousand Russian Jews lived in deplorable conditions, having been refused entry to Eretz Israel. From among these individuals, 818 persons sailed first to Marseille and crossed France by train to Bordeaux, where they boarded the Pampa for Buenos Aires, arriving in December 1891. They temporarily settled in an unfinished hotel in Mar del Sur, a beach 450 kilometers from Buenos Aires. In these unsanitary conditions, several children died, perhaps from typhus, and were buried in a small river bank. More than 50 years later, their remains were moved to Bahia Blanca Jewish Cemetery. Eventually, JCA bought land in Entre Rios province, where the group were pioneers in the large-scale Jewish colonization in this area. By 1893, the JCA was better organized and began to send more groups to the Argentine colonies.

A list of the immigrants was issued in Paris. Today, copies of 51 lists are held in the Jewish Museum owned by the CIRA Synagogue. The lists include the names of 5,361 immigrants, plus the 2,097 passengers who arrived in the first four vessels, yielding information on a total of 7,458 Jewish immigrants to Argentina between 1889 and 1901. Immigration stopped upon Baron de Hirsch=s death in May 1896, but five years later his widow decided to continue the program, and new immigrants again arrived.

The first 50 years of Jewish immigration to Argentina was celebrated in 1939 with publication of a book edited by the Organization of Jewish Institutions in Argentina (DAIA). The book includes the names of the Jews who came on the Weser. The original list has been lost; all that survives is the list in this book. The 100th anniversary was celebrated in 1999 with a party in Moisesville attended by more than 2,000 individuals. At its peak, Moisesville had approximately 5,000 residents, of whom only 150 were not Jewish, and Yiddish was the common language. Today, the city has fewer than 100 Jewish families, with many mixed marriages.

    The JCA continued to function until the 1970s. Their records were kept in the basement of the Ort Institute in Buenos Aires, where water from a broken pipe destroyed approximately 30 percent of the collection. With the help of a Jewish bank, Dr. Efraim Zafoff, grandson of colonist Boris Garfunkel, moved the documents to the Central Archives of the Jewish People (CAHJP) in Jerusalem. The CAHJP catalogued these documents a few years ago, with the help of several volunteers. In addition to the JCA rec-ords at CAHJP and the above-mentioned lists in Buenos Aires, some lists of students (1896–98) exist in Paris in the AIU Archives, because the AIU sent teachers to open schools for immigrant children in the Argentine colonies.

The Asociacion de Genealogia Judia de Argentina (the Jewish genealogical society of Argentina) obtained copies of these lists. In addition, a member of the society knew that in the Police Section of the Central Archives of Russia on Pirogov Street in Moscow was “Information on the Jews, who moved to Argentina with the help of the Central Committee of the Jewish Colonization Society 1893–1902.” A Russian offered to send copies of the list to the genealogy society.

Told that the archives in Russia has 56 lists, society members compared the Russian lists with already-known lists and found only seven new ones. The society decided to buy the seven new ones plus three that it already had (in order to compare lists). The 10 lists arrived and added 967 new names of Jewish immigrants. Thus, the society can document a total of 8,521 immigrants who came to Argentina to be colonists between 1889 and 1902. Approximately 95 percent of all Jewish immigrants arrived in that time period. The CAHJP may hold information on the missing five percent.

The archives in Moscow holds other relevant lists, e.g., women and children authorized to meet with their husbands who earlier had traveled to Argentina. Unfortunately, the individuals in Moscow increased the fee and refused to send these lists if the society did not buy all others. At that time (the end of 2001), Argentina suffered a large devaluation of its money and refused to allow money to be transferred abroad. As a result, the society was forced to stop dealing with the Russians.

The lists are written in Russian using the Cyrillic alphabet. A Russian person translated them into English and sent the English version to Argentina. Comparison of the list of last names translated from Russian to English with the list issued in Paris in French reveals many different spellings: i.e., Epstein and Epshtein, Heller and Geller, Schochetowitz and Shohetovich, and others. Some names, such as Perel and Kaplan, are not changed. The information received from Russia is more complete than that in the Paris lists. The Russian lists include surname, given name, patronymic, wife=s name, children’s names, ages and guberniya from which they came. Daughters-in-law are indicated without surnames; surnames of sons-in-law are included. One funny anecdote: in the list of the 818 passengers on the Weser is a 62-year-old woman noted as Schwiegermutter which means “mother-in-law” in German. Because the family did not know her maiden name, this was listed as her surname.

Bibliography

Avni, Haim, Argentina y la Historia de la Immigracion Judía 1810–1950 (History of Jewish Immigration to Argentina) (Buenos Aires: Magnus, 1983).

Carioli, Susana Sigwal, Colonia Mauricio (Mauricio Colony) (Buenos Aires: del Archivo, 1991).

Cociovitch, Noe, Genesis de Moisesville (Origins of Moiseville) (Buenos Aires: Mila, 1987).

Fierstein, Ricardo, Historia de los Judios Argentinos (History of the Jewish Argentineans) (Buenos Aires: Planeta, 1983).

Lewin, Boleslao, Como fue la Immigracion Judia (Buenos Aires: Plus Ultra, 1983).

Lockward, Alfonso, Presencia Judia en Santo Domingo (Presence of Jewish in Santo Domingo) (Santo Domingo:D. N. Rep. Dominicana, 1994).

Rotman, Graciela, et al., Tierra de Promesas (Promised Land) Buenos Aires: Nuestra Memoria, 1995

Paul Armony of Buenos Aires is a contributing editor for AVOTAYNU and founding president of the Jewish Genealogical Society of Argentina.