Did a crypto-Jewish community in Uruguay date back to the 1700s? Today a dwindling modern community led by dedicated rabbis tries to put the brakes on assimilation
YIDDISHE HEIM You can’t deny the friendliness of the Uruguayan Jews holding their kehillah together. Accountant Itche Margulies shows us how he has archived every Yiddish newspaper to come out of his father’s print shop
U ruguay a small country nestled between the huge territories of Argentina and Brazil on South America’s Atlantic coast doesn’t have a large active Jewish community and is not a common destination for Jews . But we were “in the neighborhood” anyway visiting shochtim and examining the famous South American slaughterhouses of the region so we took the opportunity to scout out Jewish finds in this tranquil warm verdant country. “>
There were three things that brought us to Montevideo Uruguay’s capital: One was our relationship with the country’s current chief rabbi Rabbi Ben-Tzion Spitz. Second was our close friendship with the former chief rabbi Rabbi Eliyahu Birnbaum. Rabbi Birnbaum a native of Uruguay who is today an educator and dayan with Jerusalem’s chief rabbinate is often a traveling partner on our “halachic adventures.” The final draw was an opportunity to share the adventure with a friend from the US a rabbi who has been involved with supervision of the kosher slaughterhouses in the area for many years who agreed to time a visit of his with our planned trip. Figuring that Rabbi Spitz could put us in touch with some interesting local characters to get a sense of the local Jewish history and customs we hit the ground running in order to start exploring.
There are an estimated 20000 Jews in Uruguay less than 1 percent of the country’s 3.3 million people. It is a relatively open secular egalitarian country in which one local Jew told us “there may be anti-Semites but there is no anti-Semitism.” Due to its historic stability it’s been dubbed the “Switzerland of South America.” This of course made it an attractive destination for fleeing Jews at various periods of the 20th century. In the 1970s the number of Jews peaked at about 54 000 but aliyah assimilation and emigration to the US Spain Argentina Panama and Mexico due to local difficulties have resulted in a much reduced Jewish community.
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