Southern Exposure    

“No, really, why are you even here?” That’s a question that would put off most tourists, but not globetrotter Moshe Klein, who’s made it his mission to document fading Jewish communities. While most of the fellow tribesmen he’s encountered in far-flung places are happy to see a Jewish traveler, the people he met on a recent trip to Venezuela couldn’t understand why he’d even come there at all

While Moshe Klein has visited nearly 100 countries in the years since he’s decided to document old Jewish kehillos, Venezuela hadn’t even been on his bucket list. But when his friend Dov Bleich suggested they take a trip together to a place that was out of the ordinary and truly unique, Klein was all in. Still, Bleich’s suggestion that they travel to North Korea left him with mixed feelings. Instead, Klein proposed Venezuela, a country that had never been on his radar.

“It was definitely closer than North Korea,” says Klein, “and while usually I know about the places I’m going to, I was happy to go someplace without a lot of prior knowledge and learn as I traveled.”

The fact that Venezuela has the highest Do Not Travel advisory level, due to severe risks to Americans including wrongful detention, torture in detention, terrorism, kidnapping, arbitrary enforcement of local laws, crime, civil unrest, poor health infrastructure, and unavailability of American citizen services, didn’t seem to bother him.

Flight Risk?

Looking at the map, booking a flight from New York to Venezuela, on the northern tip of South America, doesn’t seem like it would be particularly complicated, but Klein quickly discovered that with ongoing political instability, there were, in fact, no direct options.  And while Conviasa, Venezuela’s national carrier, does offer international routes, Klein had zero interest in going to Tehran, Istanbul, or Moscow to catch one of those flights and turning a 2,000-mile flight into a 10,000-mile expedition.