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As Insidious As Terrorism
Joshua Goodman / Buenos Aires
 REALITY BITES: A mezuzah adorns a home in the Guernica shelter |
Ana Rainstein remembers her childhood as a happy one. Even when business in her father's Buenos Aires shoe store was slow, he always found a way to take the family on a summer vacation, sometimes traveling as far away as Brazil or Paraguay. Ana thought she'd be able to provide the same standard of living to her four children, thanks to the fresh produce stand she and her husband Fabian ran in Lobos, their lower middle-class neighborhood.
But things began to unravel in 1993. First Fabian lost his second job at a Pepsi bottling plant. Then a foreign-owned supermarket chain set up a sleek, convenient megastore across the street from their fruit stand. The family resisted the change as best they could, but kept losing customers to their cross-street rival.
Eventually the fruit stand went out of business, and the Rainsteins were forced to move out of their rented apartment. They ended up in a shantytown on the outskirts of town living in a pick-up truck-camper lent by a friend. Without electricity or a proper toilet, and only a camping stove to cook on, stability became a fading memory.
"With only $10 in my pocket," says Fabian, "I went to a job bank looking for work." The hardest moment, he says, visibly emotional, was when their son Nestor told his parents that the only thing that mattered was that they stick together as a family. "How a 12-year-old boy could have such an insight, I'll never understand. I'll never forgive myself for having to hear that."
The Rainsteins' case is far from uncommon among Latin America's 450,000 Jews. A decade-long economic squeeze has wreaked havoc on the middle class, to which most of them belong. Sociologists call people like the Rainsteins Latin America's "new poor," and there are plenty of them: About half the region's 500 million inhabitants live below the poverty line, and the gap between rich and poor has widened over the past two decades. In Argentina, for example, traditionally the region's most egalitarian society, the richest 10 percent controlled eight times the wealth of the poorest 10 percent in 1975. By 1997, the ratio had jumped to 22-1.
Ironically, the same forces that brought spectacular economic growth of up to 10 percent per annum have enlarged the number of people living in poverty. The advent of democracy across the area in the 1980s brought with it a relaxation of economic controls, and the new freedom meant that governments left those on the economic fringes to fend for themselves.
In Argentina, two decades of double-digit unemployment and a lack of government social programs to fight it have left their mark everywhere. Buenos Aires still has its grand boulevards and lively night life, but the Argentinian middle class - traditionally the strongest in the region - has suffered mightily. The hardest hit by the invasion of foreign businesses as part of the worldwide process of globalization are often shopkeepers or small business people, like the Rainsteins. And middle-aged professionals, another group which includes many Jews, have been replaced by younger graduates who will work for lower pay. Unemployment is officially put at 10 percent, but private estimates put it far higher, as those who have given up looking for work and the legions of underemployed are not counted.
AQUARTER OF ARGENTIna's 250,000 Jews - the region's largest Jewish community - now live below the poverty line, says Bernardo Kliksberg, coordinator of the Inter-American Development Bank's social development institute in Washington, D.C.
Jewish community volunteers say it's no longer a shock to offer help to people who were once contributors to the local fundraising campaign. But, they add, it's difficult to look across the table and realize that they themselves could be in the welfare client's shoes.
"When you have college graduates who can't find work, even as janitors, the problem isn't retraining, it's creating jobs," says Nora Blaistein, director of Alianza Solidaria, a Jewish umbrella group formed to fight the Argentinian poverty plague. Alianza's parent group, the 10-year-old Tzedaka foundation, used to do some social and cultural work in the community; it now dedicates almost its entire budget to fighting Jewish poverty.
Things are still worse in other places. For the first time ever, Jews have moved into the favelas, the slums of Sao Paulo, Brazil. Up to 1,000 people travel four hours a day to get free meals doled out by an ultra-Orthodox group. More and more of the 30,000 Jews in Venezuela - where the epidemic has affected 80 percent of the population - flock to a community job bank in search of work.
The poverty of many middle-class Jews is an invisible one. Outwardly, they are well-dressed and articulate. But inside the privacy of their homes, usually the last bastion of normality to go, food can be scarce and emotional disorder alarmingly high.
Nora Blaistein tells the storyof a once-rich owner of an important Argentinian textile factory, which closed down when liberalization opened the gates to cheap fabrics from Asia. The man and his wife still live in an upscale Buenos Aires quarter, but they no longer have gas or electricity in their home. "They used to travel abroad all the time, now they can't even fill the refrigerator," Blaistein relates. "The man, who can't find a job to earn a decent living, now regularly receives community food baskets and medicine."
Embarrassment and self-isolation combine with financial hardship to gradually loosen community ties. First to go are the country club membership and the kids' day school tuition, standard status symbols that, at a minimum of $300 a month each, were until recently within reach of most card-carrying Jews. Eventually, the self-exclusion leads to broken-off friendships and a rejection of all things Jewish. The final paradox is that in an age where assimilation is widely believed to be world Jewry's greatest enemy, there's a growing mass of adults who renounce their Jewish affiliations because of economic and psychological barriers.
"Thirty years ago [Latin America's Jewish] community was just like that of the United States; every Jewish mother wanted her son to become a doctor," says Kliksberg, 60, whose family fled Poland in 1933 for Buenos Aires. "But today there are doctors who must keep two or three jobs just to feed their family," adds the soft-spoken Kliksberg, organizer of two conferences on Jewish poverty in Latin America, and author of a recent Spanish-language book on the subject. "It's an economy where the only social mobility is downward."
OR OUTWARD. SINCE HE TOOK over seven years ago as spiritual leader of the Emanu-El synagogue, a Liberal 180-family congregation in Buenos Aires's well-off, tree-filled Belgrano neighborhood, Rabbi Sergio Bergman has sent 80 families to Israel. They've settled in Kiryat Bialik, just outside Haifa, and set up a sister synagogue (see box, page 33). "The truth is that we have no clue where we're heading," says the outspoken 38-year-old rabbi. "The first thing we need to do is get our children out of here. If we can't preserve our Jewish identity in moments of prosperity, how are we going to do so in a crisis?" he says, referring to the fact that poverty has overtaken assimilation as Argentinian Jewry's primary problem.
But emigration isn't an option for most. Nor do isolated acts of anti-Semitism provide enough of a push. Indeed, the Latin and Jewish identities have meshed sufficiently for most Jewish parents to feel as comfortable sending their children to a Jewish day school as they do cheering on their local soccer club with their non-Jewish friends.
Community institutions have only recently begun to try and cushion the fall. Developing strategies to confront the social crisis is, at least in name, firmly atop the agenda of every Latin American community. But the economic crisis that has swept up so many Jewish families has also dried up the resources of institutions trying to help.
Argentina's Alianza Solidaria, created in 1997 by a group of community organizations and the American Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), was one of the first social relief agencies in the region, Jewish or otherwise, to anticipate the changing face of poverty and direct its efforts accordingly. Through a decentralized network of eight relief centers (mainly synagogues), Alianza's staff of social workers and 250 volunteers utilize a $2-million budget to assist 1,750 families.
At Emanu-El, one of Alianza's more active centers, 350 families receive everything from free prescription drugs and eye care to food baskets and psychological counseling each month. Rooms once used for Torah study have been converted into offices for community-sponsored enterprises, like a 15-car taxi agency, a tailor shop and a hallah bakery.
The Alianza's greatest achievement so far, however, is a housing development it built with $120,000 it provided and $80,000 given by the government of Buenos Aires province. In November, the Rainsteins moved into one of the six-building project's 12 tiny flats - each with two bedrooms, a bath and a compact kitchen-living room. The prefabricated homes are cold and without personality, partly because tenants lack the resources to decorate them. All of the 12 families, though, have placed mezuzot on the doors. The plot, which is the size of a soccer field, is in Guernica, a low-income Buenos Aires suburb of crumbling brick homes and unpaved dirt roads. It was donated by the Jewish country club nearby, where the newcomers have been given free memberships.
The project, whose tenants pay a symbolic monthly $50 rental, has received regional attention for being one of the first examples of a private institution working with the government to provide homes to families at risk. In addition, scholarships to Jewish day schools are made available to the 45 children living there. And the barrio's residents have discussed building a library, or maybe even a synagogue, and establishing a community-run vegetable garden to meet basic food needs.
The Rainsteins would probably still be in their van if Nestorhadn't wanted to have a bar mitzvah. Unable to cover even the minimal cost of public transportation to a synagogue, Ana, in one of the rare times in her life, went to a local synagogue to ask for help. "It was always a dream that my children be able to have a bar mitzvah, unlike their mother," says Ana. "I couldn't say no to that, no matter how much embarrassment it involved." The rabbi arranged for the congregation to cover the $500 cost of bar mitzvah lessons and the ceremony. And he turned to Alianza, which got the family nice clothing from a community thrift shop to wear at the service. There was no party.
The community then moved the family into temporary quarters, and arranged food for them. It also got Fabian, 41, a job transporting soccer balls for a Jewish-owned sports apparel firm. A year later Ana, 36, is still jobless, though she cleans houses from time to time. And Fabian's $600-a-month salary isn't enough to lift them above the $1,000-a-month poverty line. Still, things are infinitely better for the Rainsteins, who now have at least a modicum of hope.
ALIANZA'S HEADQUARTERSare in a decrepit, largely abandoned eight-floor building that once housed Rambam, the country's most prestigious Jewish high school. Ari Slain, assistant director of Alianza's micro-credit program for struggling, low-skilled entrepreneurs, was part of the school's 125-strong student body before a collapse in tuition payments shut it down in 1995. Since then, the building has been for sale by its cash-strapped owner, the AMIA Jewish Center. "This used to be a beautiful building but now it looks like it's been overrun by squatters," says Slain, a rabbinical student who's had to turn to social work to earn a living.
The rough-edged quarters are seen as a badge of honor by Alianza's 10-member staff, who say they'd rather spend their valuable time and limited funds building homes for the poor than fixing up their own headquarters. The agency has a 200-family waiting list, and Blaistein thinks another 15,000 people aren't even being reached.
Although there are enough pockets of untapped Jewish wealth left for Alianza's list of donors to grow beyond its embarrassingly small pool of 300, Argentina's Jews, like the rest of the region's, are beginning to turn to North America for help. The roughly $4 million that Argentinian institutions spend yearly on social assistance barely surpasses what Cleveland's Jewish Community Federation transfers to a handful of day schools in its community of 65,000 Jews. For Kliksberg, even a small fraction of that excess wealth could work wonders: "U.S. Jews should embrace the plight of Latin America's Jews with as much energy as they did the sufferings of Russian and Ethiopian Jewry."
But for now, at least, most U.S. Jews, when they even think about Latin American Jewry, focus only on anti-Semitism and the 115 victims of the 1992 Israeli Embassy and 1994 AMIA bombings in Buenos Aires. Indeed, the few donations that have trickled into Alianza don't amount to more than $250,000. "The daily tragedy of hungry Jews may not be as explicit as a pogrom or terrorist attack, but it's just as insidious," says Bergman.
Bergman has a back-up plan that may be just crazy enough to work. At least once a month for the past two years he's been driving some 480 kilometers westward into the Pampas to the tiny rural hamlet of Colonia Avigdor. The town is one of 170 agricultural settlements built in Argentina, after 1890, as a refuge for Europe's unwanted Jews by Baron Hirsch's Jewish Colonization Association. Drawing inspiration from the past achievements of his ancestors who arrived here empty-handed, Berg-man is building what he hopes will become a model village populated by today's urban outcasts. He's already restored the town's crumbling synagogue and begun buying land, which agronomists from Israel's Ruppin Institute will help families cultivate. He also aims to develop a small tourist trade around a museum memorializing the Jewish gaucho. "To survive as a community we need to relearn the ways of our ancestors, because their simple, campesino peasant lifestyle was far better than what most Jews will soon face," reflects Bergman somberly. When confidence is in such short supply for Latin America's Jews, even the distant hope represented by Bergman's wonderland may be worth grasping.
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