In front of every Jewish organization in Argentina, large cement pillars have been erected to prevent terrorists from slamming dynamite-packed cars through the front doors.
“These,” said Rabbi Roberto Graetz, “are the modern-day Argentine mezuzot.”
Graetz, the senior rabbi at Lafayette’s Temple Isaiah since 1991, left his native Argentina in 1980 toward the end of the “Dirty War,” when he became convinced that “there were no survivors among the disappeared.” A military junta had seized control of the government in 1976, ruling with an iron fist until the mid-’80s.
The death squads that chased Graetz and his family from the nation no longer stalk the countryside, but life remains difficult for Argentina’s Jewish community.
An economic collapse has hurt many of the nation’s Jews. According to the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, roughly 4,000 Argentine Jews were usually found on the welfare rolls in better times, but that number has since grown to 25,000.
An estimated 10 percent of the nation’s Jewish community — once one of the diaspora’s most vibrant — is living below the poverty line, bringing home less than $12,000 for a family of four, according to the Joint. An additional $26 million in communal assets went up in smoke with the failure of two Jewish-owned banks.
While Argentina once boasted one of the strongest Jewish day school systems outside of Israel, today the schools and many other vestiges of Jewish life are closing up shop.
“During my youth and young adulthood, the Jewish community was able to support these schools, and Jews sent their kids in large numbers because there was a cost support from the Jewish central organizations,” said the rabbi.
“In the last few years, we’ve seen the phenomenon of schools needing to close down because parents can’t afford the tuition, and the central Jewish community no longer has the resources to underwrite them. When I was growing up, the Jewish institutions were building synagogues, clubs, Jewish community centers, et cetera. Now, part of the Jewish community is divesting itself in order to maintain other assets.”
According to Graetz, in addition to being financially strapped, the Jewish community has never fully recovered from a pair of lethal terrorist bombings in Buenos Aires: A 1992 explosion at the Israeli embassy killed 29, and a 1994 blast at the Association Mutual Israelita Argentina (AMIA) building left 86 dead, many of them community leaders.
The perpetrators of both attacks have yet to be determined, though an Argentine investigator recently linked the AMIA attack to the Iranian government and Hezbollah.
“If you have to go through security to go to synagogue, it affects your outlook. The community has become very defensive, with a very pessimistic outlook,” said Graetz, whose mother, siblings and friends such as Buenos Aires Reform Rabbi Sergio Bergman still reside in Argentina. “Whenever something is not resolved, it festers. And in festering, there is always the suspicion that it can happen again.”
While the nation’s roughly 220,000 Jews have not been victimized by a large-scale terror attack since AMIA, they have been hit especially hard by Argentina’s economic downturn.
The globalization of the past 10 years has returned Argentina to, in Graetz’s words, “an agrarian and cattle-producing country, and not an industrial country.” As imports flooded the nation’s markets, local industry has died out.
“Medium industry is where Jews flourished economically during the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s. The Argentine Jewish community was a great bulk of the middle class,” said Graetz, who last week assumed the presidency of the American Reform Zionist Association/World Union’s Pacific Central West and Pacific Northwest regions.
“Whenever there’s a big financial crisis, the middle class suffers the brunt of it. The Jewish community, which was middle class and upper-middle class, is now lower-middle class and middle class.”
Of course, the Jewish community was also disproportionately represented among those kidnapped, tortured and killed by the country’s military dictatorship. Graetz — a former human-rights worker whose automobile brakes were once severed by a would-be-assassin — said Jews made up only 3 percent of Argentina’s population but 15 percent of the “disappeared community.”
The World Bank recently approved a bailout to Argentina, but the cash infusion may allow the nation to do little more than keep up the interest payments on its foreign debts. Graetz believes that no single loan can save Argentina, but doesn’t think the nation’s economy is beyond repair. And while Jews have experienced the worst of the bad times, they may also feel the best of the good.
“We have to ride out the Argentine crisis,” said the rabbi. “But when Argentina starts to prosper, the Jewish community has the ability to prosper again.”