From The Wall Street Journal:
The Argentine journalist Javier Sinay’s family memoir, “The Murders of Moisés Ville: The Rise and Fall of the Jerusalem of South America,” is as fascinating as it is quirky—a journey that begins in the impoverished Jewish communities of late 19th- and early 20th-century Eastern Europe and winds its way through the newly built towns on the pampas of Argentina, where, for a time, Yiddish was the common tongue.
Imagining the lilting sound of Yiddish echoing through the Argentine plains and countryside can seem like a dream. But Mr. Sinay reminds us that this was a real chapter in Jewish history. The Yiddish-speaking members of the diaspora who fled the pogroms and persecution of the Old World for South America differed little from those who landed in North America.
What we also tend to forget, or never knew, is the particular draw that attracted many Jews to the port of Buenos Aires: the possibility of owning and running a farm, courtesy of the Jewish philanthropist Maurice de Hirsch. In 1891, shocked by news of the starvation and deaths of would-be Jewish farmers lured to the pampas by fraudulent land schemes, Hirsch established the Jewish Colonization Association, designed to fund agricultural colonies for distressed Jews emigrating from Europe. Hirsch purchased large tracts of land throughout the country for new immigrants to build their own villages, where they could make a living by working the land while also maintaining their cultural and religious traditions through Jewish schools and synagogues. These farming towns grew so quickly that in 1896 Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, weighed for a moment whether the Jewish State should be situated in Palestine or in Argentina.
Moisés Ville, located some 400 miles northwest of Buenos Aires, was among the first of Hirsch’s colonies, eventually growing so big that it was dubbed the Jerusalem of South America. It was also the site, between 1889 and 1906, of the murders that Mr. Sinay refers to in his title. Perhaps most important to the author, this is where his own ancestors first settled in 1894, when they emigrated from Belarus, before moving a few years later to the Jewish-immigrant-filled neighborhoods of Buenos Aires.
. . . .
Inevitably, Mr. Sinay arrives in Moisés Ville. During its 1940s heyday, the town was home to about 5,000 Jews, which accounted for more than 90% of its population. Today, the town’s total population is less than 2,500, of which roughly 10% are Jewish, most of them elderly. Mr. Sinay describes a picturesque if sleepy scene, with the main street still called Calle Barón Hirsch. At the fully restored synagogue, he finds himself drawn to attend for the first time in his life a Friday-night service welcoming the Sabbath. Very few others are present. What happened to the once-thriving Jewish town that existed here, Mr. Sinay wonders. The answer has the ring of classic Jewish humor: “We planted wheat and harvested doctors.”
Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (PG apologizes for the paywall, but hasn’t figured out a way around it.)