Which Syrian Jews begging to resettle in Argentina intended to stay there, and which just wanted out of Syria? The answers lie in the welfare organizations’ archives

The mass Jewish emigration from Russia and Poland around the turn of the 20th century was a historic upheaval with far-reaching social, political, and humanitarian consequences. Many organizations were created to resettle the staggering number of emigrants, resulting in archives full of fascinating stories. 

Soprotimis (Sociedad Protectora de Inmigrantes Israelitas) was founded in Argentina in 1922 to absorb the many thousands of Jews arriving from eastern Europe. The organization’s archive includes no fewer than 26,000 files of aid requests and subsequent correspondence. From the mid-1930s, however, most Jews applying to the organization were seeking help finding relatives to vouch for them, enabling them to escape Europe. And once World War II ended, the files swelled with correspondence regarding Holocaust survivors searching for family and acquaintances in Latin America.

A different story altogether, spanning several files, concerns eleven Jewish families from Syria. Forty-nine people in all, they requested Soprotimis’ assistance in fleeing the country in 1958. The families were staying in Qamishli, a town not far from the Turkish border, awaiting permits to leave Syria. The correspondence describes them as farmers. 

The Argentine government was then encouraging farm workers to settle the great wastelands of Patagonia. So the plan was to send the Syrians to the Jewish Colonization Association (JCA) agricultural colony founded by Baron Maurice de Hirsch in the southern Argentinian province of Rio Negro – on the assumption that they were a perfect match for Argentina’s needs, and vice versa.

In fact, the initial appeal to Soprotimis came from the Sephardic community in Buenos Aires, one of whose donors was related to the Syrian families and therefore negotiated on their behalf with the welfare organizations. 

The group’s exodus dragged on from 1959 to 1962 and involved the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS)as well as Soprotimis. Much of the relevant correspondence between the two organizations is labeled “classified.” Between the lines, it emerges that Jews were actually exploiting Argentina’s immigration policy to get out of Syria and settle in Israel. But who exactly knew that, and who was simply taken advantage of? 

 

Moving Out

The first two households left Syria for Argentina only in the winter of 1961. Tremendous efforts preceded their departure. HIAS and Soprotimis had gotten them Argentinian entry permits, which they’d submitted to the Argentinian consul in Damascus in October 1960. He was then to stamp a visa on their Syrian exit permits. Yet Syrian bureaucracy and political instability necessitated countless extensions of the entry permits. A relative in Argentina also paid the astronomical exit fees demanded by the Syrian government. Meanwhile, the families were growing. Then one newborn died, creating a discrepancy between the immigration documents and the immigrants themselves. 

On February 27, 1961, the two families finally set sail from Beirut to Italy. Then events took a strange turn. When the ship docked in the Greek port of Piraeus, a pregnant woman from the group asked to see a doctor. Though pregnancy and seasickness are hardly an unexpected combination, all ten members of the two families accompanied her to the hotel where the doctor’s appointment was to take place. Two Jewish Agency officials just “happened” to be there and persuaded them to continue on to Israel instead, as their ship had left without them. Subsequently interviewed for official protocol by HIAS representatives, they claimed they’d been unable to locate the HIAS agent in Greece who could have helped them proceed to Argentina.

Both families settled in Kfar Saba, where they had relatives and found employment, and one even Hebraicized its name. But then all concerned realized that by diverging from the original plan, they were playing with fire. In choosing Israel as their final destination, they were reducing their fellow Syrian Jews’ chances of receiving exit clearance. So the two families wrote to their Argentinian sponsor, saying they’d been deceived by the Jewish Agency officials and brought to Israel, but their real preference was Argentina. 

By now, however, they all had Israeli passports. So their Argentinian entry permits had to be transferred from their expired transit documents to these new passports. The Argentinian consul in Tel Aviv saw to all that, but then Israeli bureaucracy became the main hurdle. The Ministry of the Interior had to revoke the families’ status as new immigrants, the Foreign Ministry had to process their exit from the country, and the Treasury had to waive the exit duties and travel tax. The adult men under age fifty needed an exemption from army service as well. 

Both families wanted the Jewish Agency to promise to help them come back to Israel if they didn’t like Argentina, but no such guarantee was given.

 

 

Back to the Diaspora

The two families finally set sail for Argentina via France at the beginning of June 1961. Fellow travelers and officials recorded that the transplants were disgruntled and left a poor impression. Correspondence between the aid organizations describes their behavior as “primitive” and their children as unruly. En route from France, they even insisted on  first-class cabins and an HIAS escort.

Their arrival in Argentina was no less fraught. The staff that greeted them had to pay hefty bribes to get all their baggage through customs without inspection or duties, then transport it to Patagonia. The families wouldn’t allow their children to spend the night at their sponsor’s house, demanding instead that Buenos Aires’ Sephardic community provide them with hotel rooms and food for the two days they spent in town. And they insisted on an interpreter for the thirty-hour train ride to the far south. 

In Rio Negro, three Arabic-speaking representatives of JCA and Soprotimis were waiting at the station to take them to their new, fully furnished home in the General Roca colony. A letter from the JCA official in Rio Negro to the Latin American chairman of HIAS describes their dramatic arrival in Patagonia:

Men, women, children, and a hundred and one packages were all on the platform […] when a loud argument broke out in Arabic, accompanied by much hand waving […]. In the end we got the message – the M. family refused to go to the colony. They wanted to live only in town, not on a farm. They couldn’t be persuaded to accept the house that had been prepared for them for even one night […]; our people were embarrassed […]. At one point P. M. himself ran for the police, and S. M. and his five children began shouting hysterically. The locals suspected it was all a performance […]. After two hours of trying, we gave up and began looking for a hotel for them […]. 

The next day, too, all efforts were in vain, and they insisted they’d been promised tractors and wheat fields in town. When no answer was forthcoming, they demanded at the top of their lungs that they be returned to Buenos Aires at once […]. None of our promises to find a solution, even to locate a Jewish doctor to take care of the pregnant woman, could satisfy them. 

Saturday morning, all ten family members broke into the hotel where the Soprotimis and JCA staff were staying, demanding their immediate return to Buenos Aires […]. The Syrians were shouting, and we couldn’t control them. At one point P. M. picked up a heavy object and wanted to throw it at us. That’s when the JCA clerk realized he had to get rid of them fast. He himself paid for their trip back to Buenos Aires […]. They gathered up their wives and children, who’d been sitting like Gypsies in the corner all the while, [and] went back to the hotel. From that moment, peace was restored in the town.

HIAS and Soprotimis broke off all contact with the families. Realizing that they’d wanted to emigrate to Israel the whole time, the organizations feared they’d be suspected by JCA and the Argentinian authorities of active involvement in the scam. Back in Buenos Aires, the Sephardic community tried but failed to find something suitable for the Syrians elsewhere in Argentina. A telegram from July 9, 1961, reveals that the Jewish Agency sent both families back to Israel. 

The Jewish relief agencies were now concerned that their entire global strategy would go down the drain if the Argentinian and Syrian authorities discovered what had happened. So they reported to the Argentinian immigration office on the families’ arrival, but nothing else. 

Nearly all the correspondence on file expresses the organizations’ viewpoint. We can only imagine how the families felt about being uprooted again, having already settled into a familiar climate and Jewish community in Israel, only to embark for some godforsaken place near the South Pole.

Only one letter reflects this perspective. Having spoken with the emigrants after their return from Rio Negro, a Jewish official – perhaps a social worker – emphasized that the aid organizations urging them to leave Israel had promised one thing, but the reality was quite another. They weren’t told they’d have to lodge their children with strangers, which only added to their fear and disappointment. That, together with their alien surroundings, solidified their yearning for Israel, where they’d felt safe.

 

Escape Route

A letter from one HIAS employee to another from November 1962, over a year after the first Syrian families had finally returned to Israel, reveals that seven more “farming families” immigrated to the Holy Land using exit permits intended to escort them to Argentina. The method had clearly proven itself, and HIAS hoped to use it to help other families still waiting in Syria. 

The eleven households’ exodus set a precedent for another seventy-seven families, numbering as many as five hundred souls, who spent years languishing in a Syrian town on the Turkish border before setting out for “Argentina,” though really headed for Israel.

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The Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People rescues, restores, and preserves historical documents concerning the Jewish people from communities worldwide, from the Middle Ages to the present

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A booklet produced by a Zionist youth movement in Rhodesia reflects a rich and vibrant community that lasted less than a century. Its young authors had no idea civil war was about to change their world forever

Very little has been published about the Jewish community in Rhodesia, today Zimbabwe. Jews came – and went – with colonial rule in the region, starting with traders arriving from western Europe (particularly England) over the course of the 19th century. When Britain conquered Rhodesia at the end of that century, Jews were among the first settlers in the town of Bulawayo, and the first white baby born there was a Jewish girl. A tent was erected to serve as a synagogue for the High Holy Days of 1894, and the few Jews who used it bickered constantly in the years that followed. The first organized community was set up in Rhodesia a few months later, when the need arose for a Jewish cemetery. Two more Jewish centers were established that same year, one in Salisbury (now Harare), the other in Gwelo.

By 1900, there were three hundred Jews in Bulawayo, with a full range of communal organizations and a busy cultural schedule. The community was extremely pro-Zionist, with 170 of its 220 members registered with the local branch of Hovevei Zion (Lovers of Zion), one of the earliest Zionist organizations, originating in eastern Europe.

Ashkenazic Jews from Lithuania joined the community early on, and a sprinkling of Sephardic Jews arrived from Rhodes. The 1930s saw an influx of Jewish refugees from Germany, and a petition addressed to the colonial government requested that immigration rules be relaxed to provide asylum for more. After World War II, Jews came mostly from England and South Africa.

Two important national bodies were formed in 1943: the Rhodesian Jewish Board of Deputies, modeled on a parallel British organization, and the Rhodesian Zionist Council. Over the years, Rhodesian Jewish institutions maintained close contact with their equivalents in South Africa. Both communities grew in tandem with the region’s booming economy, and the Rhodesian Jewish population peaked in 1961, numbering over seven thousand.

With the black majority’s struggle for control of the country in the 1970s, security deteriorated and most Jews left. Today only about two hundred Jews live in Zimbabwe, most of them elderly.

 

Succeeding Too Well

One of the many and varied Jewish organizations active in Rhodesia over the decades in which the Jewish community flourished was Ihud Ha-bonim Bnei Zion, the Children of Zion Union of Builders. The movement celebrated its fortieth anniversary in 1970, the same year things began going wrong for the Rhodesian Jewish community, and a booklet marked the event with greetings, briefings, and hopes for the future. The president of Rhodesia, Clifford Dupont, and the mayor of Bulawayo both praised Ha-bonim’s contribution to Rhodesian society in general, and to the Jewish community in particular. The mayor, who attended the festivities, lauded these young people’s traditional Jewish values. Such ancient wisdom, he pointed out, was the ultimate bulwark against the pernicious ideologies that had begun sweeping Rhodesia – ideologies that in less than a decade would overturn white rule in the republic.

Rhodesia’s Jewish organizations measured Ha-bonim’s success by the many local young people emigrating to Israel. Sadya Kaplan, Ha-bonim’s founder in Rhodesia, herself already living in Israel, proudly reported that members of the movement held prominent positions all over the country. She urged those still in Rhodesia to come to Israel and help build it. Rhodesian chief rabbi Isaac Zwebner claimed that Zionist education was a natural offshoot of Jewish education and a way of spreading moral and spiritual values throughout the world. For Simon Strauss, head of the Zionist Youth Council, Ha- bonim’s most substantial achievement was its work with students, helping them defend Israel against widespread condemnation on university campuses. Rhodesia, he claimed, had the highest percentage of young Jews enrolled in Zionist youth movements in the whole Diaspora.

One article in the booklet asked: “Where is Ihud Ha-bonim headed?” Its authors, presumably movement veterans, wrote that Ha-bonim’s camps and seminars played a crucial role in Jewish education in a country with no Jewish high schools. Unlike the mayor, these youth leaders made no mention of the threat to white domination looming over their community. They were concerned only with the effect of political change on Jewish education, which lacked leadership because so many young people had left for Israel. As loyal Zionists, they obviously saw this as more of a badge of pride than a problem, happily relying on South African peers to staff their seminars.

The authors concluded with Ha-bonim’s motto, quoting the Babylonian Talmud: “Read not ‘your sons’ but ‘your builders.’” Clearly the movement was achieving its aims in Rhodesia, contributing to a rich and lively Diaspora and building the State of Israel. This vision of Ha-bonim’s future in Rhodesia held not a hint of the sudden and speedy disappearance of the community. Less than a decade later, at the end of a bitter guerilla war, revolution and black majority rule had frightened off most of the country’s white population. Its Jews dispersed around the world, mostly to South Africa and Israel. 

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The Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People rescues, restores, and preserves historical documents concerning the Jewish people from communities worldwide, from the Middle Ages to the present

Archive website