Buenos Aires Jewish Community
The Buenos Aires Jewish community was established in 1862, and held its first traditional Jewish wedding in 1868. The first synagogue was inaugurated in 1875. The Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern Europe who settled in Argentina were called rusos (Russians) by the local population.
In January 1919 in Buenos Aires, during a general strike, the police fomented pogroms that targeted Jews and destroyed their property. In the strike's aftermath, civilian vigilante gangs (the Argentine Patriotic League) went after so-called agitators (agitadores), and killed or wounded "scores of victims", including "numerous Russian Jews who were falsely accused of masterminding a Communist conspiracy".
European Jews continued to immigrate to Argentina, including during the Great Depression of the 1930s and to escape increasing Nazi persecutiion. "In 1939 half the owners and workers of small manufacturing plants were foreigners, many of them newly arrived Jewish refugees from Central Europe".
Jewish cultural and religious organizations flourished in the cities; a Yiddish press and theatre opened in Buenos Aires, as well as a Jewish hospital and a number of Zionist organizations.
Read more about this topic: Argentine Jews
Famous quotes containing the words jewish and/or community:
“For every nineteenth-century middle-class family that protected its wife and child within the family circle, there was an Irish or a German girl scrubbing floors in that home, a Welsh boy mining coal to keep the home-baked goodies warm, a black girl doing the family laundry, a black mother and child picking cotton to be made into clothes for the family, and a Jewish or an Italian daughter in a sweatshop making “ladies” dresses or artificial flowers for the family to purchase.”
—Stephanie Coontz (20th century)
“Populism is folkish, patriotism is not. One can be a patriot and a cosmopolitan. But a populist is inevitably a nationalist of sorts. Patriotism, too, is less racist than is populism. A patriot will not exclude a person of another nationality from the community where they have lived side by side and whom he has known for many years, but a populist will always remain suspicious of someone who does not seem to belong to his tribe.”
—John Lukacs (b. 1924)