At Ease In Brazil
Sachar, Howard
AT EASE IN BRAZIL The prominent scholar and Jewish historian meets with a little-known and well-entrenched community south of the border HOWARD SACHAR The Sephardic Foothold Renewed With his...
...Since the mid-1960s, the government had imposed import quotas on foreign automobiles and automobile parts...
...They are hardly a Jewish innovation in hedonism...
...Lorch played a leading role in settling German Jews during the 1930s and 1940s...
...Interestingly enough, synagogue attendance is one of them, and it has as little to do with religiosity in Brazil as in other Western communities...
...Max Feffer, the son of Leon, and the technological genius of the Feffer paper and pulp empire, was appointed secretary of culture, scienr...
...The barriers to political activity have been as minimal as those in the economic sphere...
...In Leon Feffer's case, his free hours were spent at the Circulo Israelita do Sao Paulo, a social club that had sprung up among the immigrant children of Bom Retire...
...There have been Jewish generals in the armed forces-six of them in 1966...
...He's done well enough to afford four apartments...
...At this point, he might have followed the example of the Klabins, East European Jews whose firm was the largest manufacturer of paper products in Latin America...
...Inthe following years, Vargas silenced op...
...It's your own behavior you have to worry about...
...Whom did she marry...
...The simple people there may still regard Jews as Christ-killers...
...The Accommodation of Congeniality Devotion to Israel meanwhile remains as powerful a gravitational field for Brazilian Jewry as for any community in the Diaspora...
...The building was modernistic and vast, seven stories high...
...Salama nodded...
...Ultimately, some 3,000 Syrian-Lebanese Jews made their homes in Rio and Sao Paulo, where they prospered as merchants and small manufacturers...
...No more than 14,000 Central European Jews entered before the outbreak of war, and afterward perhaps 4,000 others made their way from neighboring countries...
...Copyright © 1985 by Howard M. Sachar...
...One of the latter was an American with blond, modishly long hair...
...That period in our history ended in the 1930s...
...We're not snobs...
...The Sabbath morning I walked in, nearly every seat was filled...
...Few Americans can be induced to serve here...
...They take no position against social change-or for it...
...Exploiting the crisis, Getulio Vargas, a wealthy landowner and president of the state 0( Rio Grande do Sul, seized control 0( the nation's presidency in 1930...
...Handsome apartments and seaside villas are the norm...
...Among these were some 2,000 Russian Jews...
...The results of this prodigious investment have been dramatic...
...After their marriage in 1925, they resolved to maintain that tradition...
...Few Jewish students have been induced to attend...
...Malnutrition was becoming widespread even before soaring energy costs in the 1970s drove Brazil to the threshold of insolvency...
...Between 1949 and 1959, a Jew, Horacio Laufer, served consecutively as minister of finance and of foreign affairs...
...With the tacit support of important church leaders, the Integralistas devoted an entire branch of their secret service organization to the surveillance of Brazilian Jewry...
...My son, Eric, has a fine executive position at the Bank Safra...
...The tone is invariably friendly...
...This time, most of the newcomers were Aleppines...
...Lorch's leadership, the Central Europeans organized their own welfare and employment services, their own cultural and musical societies, their own synagogue, Congregacao Israelita Paulista-the CIP...
...A legendary figure in this effort was Dr...
...There's no strong leadership here," Milnitzky continued, mercifully sparing me the need of a reply, "certainly no rabbis worthy of anyone's attention...
...He was attracted to Brazil, by its vast resources, and by President JusceBno Kubitschek's proclaimed desire for immigrants with entrepreneurial expe rience...
...Heaven forbid...
...In ensuing years, there has been a decline in both the quality of teaching personnel and the quantity of students...
...The international market for coffee diminished sharply...
...Salama allowed himself a complacent smile...
...It was not a risk that appealed to Feffer...
...To no one's surprise, Feffer was elected chairman of the federation, and in later years he remained one of its permanent vice-chairmen...
...Sabbath services are friendly social occasions...
...Sixtyish, with finely chiseled features, he was as lean as Athias was portly...
...Family integrity," asserted Salama...
...These included Jews from Hungary, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt and Turkey...
...With its population of nearly 300,000, Belem was a substantial, if rather somnolent, community...
...AT EASE IN BRAZIL The prominent scholar and Jewish historian meets with a little-known and well-entrenched community south of the border HOWARD SACHAR The Sephardic Foothold Renewed With his sallow complexion and comfortable belly, Isaac Athias could have passed for a river planter whose best years of dissipation were behind him...
...Some unquestionably would be lost...
...An Equivocal Welcome to Europeans One gains some insight into the expansion of this giant southern domain, as large as the continental United States, with room for another Texas, by appreciating that its population has quintupled since World War I, and that, until very recently, its rate of economic growth has consistently surpassed that of the United States...
...With two other young immigrants, he opened a small distributorship, buying paper from factories, selling it to wholesalers and retailers...
...Prosperity and Anchorage In 1945, President Vargas was deposed and constitutional government was restored in Brazil...
...Between the 1920s and the 1950s, nearly half the Jewish children received their primary education in Jewish day schools...
...On the dais-this time at the front of the sanctuary-Chief Rabbi Emeritus Pinkuss was enthroned, flanked by three younger associate rabbis...
...Not to be outdone, the Jews of Rio have constructed their own modern Hebraica building on the prestigious Rua des Laranjeiras...
...Here, too, the sanctuary was all but filled...
...Our children attend the day schools here...
...I'm not complaining...
...No man, not even Leon Feffer, has won greater attention or respect from his fellow Jews...
...Rio was a lure that frightened Athias...
...Isaac Athias would have found it unthinkable to abandon those traditions...
...As I contemplated an answer, his son-one of three who shared his practice with him-apologetically interrupted us...
...A military coup in 1964 accelerated this progress...
...While the fund-raising campaigns of the various communities were invariably productive, there was a growing recognition in later years that a centralized body was required to deal with the government and the outside world, to foster understanding for the Jewish National Home in Palestine...
...al-toough in Rio the proportion remains closer to 50 percent...
...From then on, growth was exponential...
...But they simply can't be indifferent to the horrifying economic inequities in our society...
...If he wished to continue selling paper, Leon Feffer decided, he would have to produce it himself...
...Vargas began to have second thoughts about flagrant pro-Axis propaganda on Brazilian territory, and in 1935 he suppressed the Integralistas...
...Again under Dr...
...By 1933, Brazil's Jewish population had climbed to 42,000...
...The connection was resumed as early as 1822, when the country achieved its independence from Portugal...
...But we aren't snobs," he emphasized again...
...The voyage consumed a full month...
...But you also don't have to make every communal function, every synagogue gathering, the occasion to air your fashionable worries about the dangers of intermarriage, of the "assimilation" of your children...
...Descriptions of Jewish holidays, interviews with Jewish leaders, appear in the general press...
...By the eve of World War I, the Jewish population of Brazil reached 7,000, almost equally divided between Europeans and non-Ashkenazim...
...It's the kind of behavior that we Jews, of all people, can't afford to emulate...
...between 25 and 30 percent...
...Predominantly Sephardic even now, the Jews of Belem and Manaus sustain their traditions of Iberian piety and dignity...
...Ethnic gregariousness alone probably would have done the job...
...Tens of thousands of Syrians and Lebanese of all religions were pouring into Brazil...
...Relations between the two countries remained cordial, scientific and cultural exchanges between them extensive...
...Like most of their fellow Jewish immigrants, they rented a flat in the lower-middle-class Bom Retire quarter...
...By 1945, he was employing 500 workers...
...In proportion to their numbers, the Sephardic communities have matched the Ashkenazic Jews cruzeiro for cruzeiro in support of this institution...
...A more decisive influence, however, was the Brazilian economic miracle...
...Today, with a membership that is Ashkenazic but no longer exclusively German, the CIP is the largest synagogue in Brazil and the second-largest in Latin America...
...Our people simply are too attracted by Brazilian materialism...
...The annual growth rate in the 1960s and 1970s was spectacular...
...Then, with the outbreak of the World War, his family was left on its own and nearly perished in the upheavals of transplantation, revolution and civil war...
...Almost from the beginning of his career, too, he identified himself with Jewish affairs...
...nos Aires, a major focus of Jewish identity is a luxurious sports facility, country club-community center...
...It was a community center, after all...
...The most important contribution you can make to Jewish survival here will be the example you set in your behavior as human beings.'" As I left his office, it occurred to me that the Benno Milnitzkys I had met in my travels-in my own country for that matter-I could count on the fingers of one hand...
...Adaptation to an Open Society I sat with Leon Feffer in the sunroom of his luxurious duplex...
...By 1930, he was able to buy out his partners...
...His face became hard...
...One of their number, Edmond Safra now owned the twelfth-largest bank in Brazil...
...By 1965, the Jewish population had reached 110,000...
...It is a fact...
...By 1964, the last year of Brazil's democratic government, less than a third of Sao Paulo's Jews still lived in the Bom Retire district...
...but Leon, who mastered Portuguese within a year, was chafing to be on his own...
...Eventually, he was outvoted...
...Within the next four years, 100 percent of the company's output was being produced from local eucalyptus supplies...
...Athias was as indigenous to this vast Amazonian behemoth of a nation as any seringueiro plantation owner...
...Nearly 200 Lebanese Jewish families had settled there as early as the turn of the century, discerning in Brazil a country with a need for a commercial class...
...It was by no means a negligible total, and in time German-speaking immigrants comprised a fourth of Sao Paulo's Jewish population...
...Ezekiel is a factory representative...
...With a vivacity that belied his years, he recalled the crises of World War II, the Vargas era of homegrown fascism, the postwar influx of nearly 10,000 displaced persons, the attempt to legitimize Zionism in Brazil...
...That's where we can still teach the Ashkenazim a thing or two...
...These latter arrived in the post-World War II era...
...This is a Zionist community," insisted Fiszel Czeresnia, chairman of Brazil's Zionist Organization...
...Observance of Jewish traditions, the dietar laws, attendance at synagogues, all remained a central feature of their existence...
...As in Chile and Argentina, the largest numbers of Brazilian Jews remain suspicious of populist democracy...
...But the emotion has never become malevolent or even open...
...Much of their press was still Yiddish, and was disallowed with the other foreign-language publications...
...And paper...
...With the exception of the more recent Sephardic immigrant groups, Jewish parents discern little need any longer to "ghettoize" their children...
...Was it the wave of the future...
...The son of Ukrainian Jews who had settled originally in the Baron de Hirsch colony of Quadro Irmaos, he moved later with his parents to the ghetto of Bom Retire...
...While not overly anti-Semitic himself the President tolerated Jew-baiting to placate his right-wing landowner and lumpenproletariat supporters...
...They owned a large cotton gin and a flour mill...
...A synagogue was erected in Belem, and here the Athiases worshiped, amid a local population of Portuguese, blacks and mestizos...
...As an adult, working first as a bookkeeper, then as a traveling salesman for a paint company, he followed the dietary laws even in the isolated towns and villages of the interior...
...The scraps would have fed those poor wretches' families for a week...
...It's from the Confederation," he explained...
...There are alternate routes to identification, beyond schools and institutes...
...More ominously, in 1937 the Vargas regime introduced severe restrictions on immigration-at the very moment that Jewish refugees from Hitler were turning to Brazil for sanctuary...
...Yet they mixed freely with non-Jews, as well, for Brazil by the 20th century was an easygoing blend of meridional and African languor...
...European Jews were slower than the Sephardim in grasping its potential...
...Zionism animates every Jewish institution we have in this country...
...There was no chitchat...
...We'll intermarry with them now, but we'll not intermarry with the Gentiles...
...In the later hours, entire families, or the younger Jewish smart set, will have their dinners served in one or another of the Hebraica's dining rooms, then dance to fashionable society orchestras...
...More a community center than a synagogue, the CIP was a Place to find good books and journals w the German language, a source of 'nforrnation on legal and administrative matters, a kind of unofficial employment exchange...
...By 1939, with its 200 employees, Leon Feffer & Cia...
...This is a Catholic country, after all, and the church's influence is quite strong in the interior...
...My daughter, Maureen, had an excellent position in an import house before she married...
...the ship dropped anchor in Rio de Janeiro in late January 1921...
...The Feffers could sense it...
...In Rio and Sao Paulo, several publishing houses have intermittently brought out translations of well-known Jewish volumes...
...The newcomers did the rest on their own...
...Clear out of this place...
...Germans, Japanese, Italian and other ethnic communities similarly maintain their own community center-country clubs...
...The reservoir of Portuguese-speaking rabbis is limited for Sao Paulo's 30 synagogues, Rio's 12 synagogues...
...At the time of writing, as many as 90 percent of the Brazilian people are believed to be afflicted with a near-medieval array of diseases, from tuberculosis to parasitic infestations...
...A complex of eight buildings, some of them 10 floors high, it is all but a four-star hotel in comfort and decor...
...position through censorship, arbitrarj arrest, torture and assassination...
...The atmosphere was warm, homey, yet without the chaotic lack of decorum often encountered in Orthodox Ashkenazic synagogues...
...It was still the widely held expectation of their generation...
...This is the empire created by a Ukrainian Jewish immigrant family...
...schooling in the town of Breves...
...His father had arrived from the Ukraine in 1912 in search of a foothold for his wife and children...
...I don't mind that Brazilian society is open," he insisted...
...Parties, weddings, bar mitzvah receptions are lavish...
...We're prob-*'y not quite as devout as the Syrians...
...A special delivery letter had arrived...
...Athias himself married Amelia Dimanstein, an ophthalmologist of Polish extraction-upon satisfying himself first that she was prepared to maintain a strict Jewish home...
...The ordeal ended only in 1920, when a letter arrived from the father, containing funds for boat tickets to Brazil...
...Well respected and connected...
...Ludwig Lorch, a surgeon who had arrived from Germany several years earlier and had established a thriving practice...
...But that was not our way, or the way of the Sephardim...
...By 1939, Jews owned several of the nation's largest textile mills, many of the largest wholesale distributorships, retail shops and department stores...
...Balkan and Italian Sephardim were welcome in the Moroccan congregations...
...During the next few years, he imported new paper-making equipment from Sweden and the United States, and by 1950 his company was the largest manufacturer of quality paper in Brazil...
...Their children attended either Brazilian or English-language institutions...
...If the figure is calculated at 130,000, it would represent less than one-fifth of one percent of the total Brazilian population of approximately 130 million by 1984...
...In the university context, unfortunately, those issues claim most of their extracurricular time...
...Some nine thousand Egyptian Jews now joined them "We were not beggars," Salama insisted...
...The Deitcher [German Jews] didn't always agree," Feffer recalled, with some amusement...
...We think it's even older than the Moroccan tradition...
...I suppose I antagonized a lot of people several weeks ago at a community banquet...
...Their children were sent to the state schools or the English-language private schools...
...When his family moved later to a smaller community, Isaac Athias, his brothers and his sisters were sent upriver for their Howard Sachar is a professor at George Washington University and author of a number of books, including The Course of Modern Jewish History...
...Between 1945 and 1965, approximately 20 million newcomers of various backgrounds were admitted into the country...
...He paused...
...But they involved themselves in other Jewish activities, particularly those that fostered their acculturation...
...Then, i 1957, Nasser liquidated the totality of Jewish holdings...
...In recent decades, they intermingled freely...
...In earlier years, during the crest of the Brazilian economic boom, the effulgence of Jewish communal life tended to blend with a more widely diffused prosperity...
...Our l^ople received a much wider cultural ^"ing, after all...
...Here as elsewhere, they maintained separate communities, synagogues and philanthropies...
...For nearly 50 years he had devoted a major portion of his leisure time to his Moroccan-Sephardic kehillah, with its own social welfare fund, its own four synagogues...
...Highly literate and well-versed in business affairs, they were in the forefront of Brazil's remarkable economic takeoff...
...Family integrity," asserted Salama...
...Five decades later, that need remained...
...Czeresnia's view was too draco-nian...
...Not less than 70 million trees are growing in Feffer-owned forests, and 10,000 men are working there...
...The nation's cultural life has been as widely influenced by-the Jewish leaven as in any Western land, from the conductor of the national symphony orchestra to directors of state academies and institutes to deans of universities...
...In this racially open society, ethnicity was less important than observance...
...We spoke French or Ladino at home, and so we had no difficulty with Portuguese afterward...
...Between 1948 and 1983, 3,000 Brazilian Jews settled in Israel...
...Accordingly, Salama sold his label company, bought control of an automobile parts factory-and soon became a millionaire twice over...
...In the largest integrated pulp, paper and board operation in Latin America, the Feffer company is currently producing a daily output of 1,000 tons of paper, 500 tons of pure pulp, 400 tons of board...
...It is an opulent social life...
...They take no position against social change-or for it...
...Accordingly, the Jewish Federation of Sao Paulo was established in 1946, then similar federations in Rio and in ther cities soon afterward, and fi-° Hv a national Confederation of Brazilian Jewish Communities, r^ffer was a pioneer in these unifying ventures, and he and his associates did not have an easy time at first...
...Salama confessed...
...One cannot predict how long even this free and easy, typically Brazilian, version of social Judaism will survive...
...Years later, Feffer asked himself how he could have missed...
...Nominally Liberal, the CIP was somewhat akin to American Conservatism, and its first rabbi, Dr...
...Their children had gone to university, and not a few later prospered...
...There is no mystery to the dropoff...
...Jews have been mayors of Curitiba and Rio de Janeiro (where squares and streets are named for Theodor Herzl, David Ben-Gurion, Anne Frank and other Jews...
...Loyalty, pride of peoplehood-we don't compromise there...
...From Aleppo...
...In later years, Jews sat in state and municipal cabinets...
...Well into the 1970s, the nation's indicators seemed headed uninterruptedly upward...
...The number is even smaller in Rio...
...The organizational pattern of Brazilian Jewry was still determined by origin and language, with separate communities of Sephardic, German, Polish and Hungarian Jews maintaining individual synagogues, networks of social services and burial societies...
...Not if he could help it...
...Brazil's Jewry is still of more recent vintage than Argentina's...
...Mine is hardly a unique success story," he admitted...
...I don't say that we may not lose a few of our people to intermar-riage"-here plainly he was speaking of marriage between faiths-"but hardly to the extent that the Ashkenazim do...
...Most of them were brought over by the renowned Bavarian Jewish philanthropist Baron Moritz de Hirsch, an enormously wealthy financier, builder of the Trans-Balkan railroad, who settled them on his farm colonies in the southern Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul...
...Awaiting them on the Copacabana's Rua Barata Ribeiro was a magnificent Sephardic synagogue, founded decades earlier by immigrants from Turkey, Greece and Rhodes...
...Nor would they deal any longer with a captive constituency...
...Brazilian Jewry is gregarious...
...But we stick to the straight and narrow...
...Obviously, there is anti-Semitism here and there," observes Rolf Herzberg, director of the Jewish Federation of Sao Paulo...
...Between the 1920s and 1950s, nearly half the Jewish children in Sao Paulo and Rio received their primary education in a cluster of privately funded Jewish day schools, where the level of study was reasonably high...
...Even the military coup of 1964, which established a technocratic autocracy, did nothing to arouse anti-Semitism or to exploit group frictions...
...Organize your community activities at the synagogue...
...They do not listen to his exhortations comfortably, for Milnitzky is a Cassandra...
...If the Jews encountered no significant political or legal obstacles to their economic advance after World War II, a certain public esteem for Israel may have been a factor...
...It is a matter of caring for family...
...of nationalities-Italian, Spanish, Turkish...
...No doubt they would undergo the fate of small-town Jews in any other Western country...
...But since the 1970s, elections have become somewhat perfunctory, with fewer than five thousand local Jews voting...
...Of course, it was at the Hebraica...
...And when I spoke, I spoke in plain language...
...We intermarried...
...There he met his wife...
...Once they were vigorously contested, with candidates running on Zionist-style party lists that were replications of the Knesset electoral system in Israel-and evidence of the enormous impact of Zionism on the Diaspora (precisely as Lorch had anticipated...
...With a few exceptions-mainly university students and a handful of progressives in the state and national legislatures-Jews have not taken a stand on the nation's horrifying economic inequalities...
...Most of them prefer to avoid the risk of ending up in the wrong camp...
...For East European Jews, fleeing the crypto-fascist regimes of postwar Romania and Poland, the Caribbean basin and South America emerged as major sanctuaries...
...He and his research staff set about conducting experiments, and at last, in 1954, they came up with a promising method...
...Known as Philipson and Quadro Irmaos, the two colonies were an extension of a much larger project de Hirsch was underwriting for Jews in neighboring Argentina-and they proved even less enduring than their Argentine counterparts...
...The father was earning a tolerable livelihood in his paper products trade...
...It's the link with Israel that has kept Brazilian Jewry from expiring as a community...
...Israeli themes remain central to Jewish communal and cultural life in Brazil-as evidenced (we recall) in the Knesset-style party lists for the federation elections...
...Interfaith activities are common, with church leaders benignly participating...
...Almost surrealistically in debt, threatening to default on some $90 billion in foreign bank loans, the government no longer can give even passing attention to measures for social improvement...
...Not since the Inquisition had Jews faced such organized hostility in this land...
...Living in comparative prosperity, accepted by the elite strata of Brazilian society, they appear content with the political status quo...
...The danger proved to be shortlived, however...
...Then, in the early 1900s, attracted at last by the nation's evidently limitless supplies of rubber, diamonds and timber, immigrants from throughout Europe suddenly began pouring into Brazil at the rate of about 100,000 a year...
...I strolled over...
...What will happen to our children in this Jewish cultural wilderness...
...lamented Raoul Doctorchik, a B'nai B'rith officer from Recife, in a letter to the International Jewish Monthly...
...The Jewish fanners soon began wandering from the soil to the cities...
...Less than three blocks away, on Rua Antonio Carlos, services were being conducted at the Congregacao Israelita Paulista...
...Milnitzky read it carefully, brow furrowed...
...It's the only thing to do...
...After all, we Egyptian Jews bring special advantages with us...
...For decades, the bedrock of Jewish ethnicity lay in education...
...ica quarter, the center encompasses 8 2,000-seat auditorium, a theater, am...
...But their early years were hard...
...However enlightened the practice, the sheer number of conversions is evidence of a rising wave of intermarriages (most of them, no doubt, unaccompanied by conversions) that would have been unimaginable a generation earlier...
...While Aleppo remained the poorest Jewish community in the Near East, its emigres later became westernized as they passed through the alembic of Beirut before traveling on to the New World...
...Five years after that, it employed 300 and was the largest producer of labels in Brazil...
...Arriving with his wife and two children in Sao Paulo, where his inlaws had settled four years earlier, Salama quickly got the lay of the land, ^jth a bank loan, he opened a small workshop to manufacture clothing la-l^ls...
...So it was-and is-in Belem and Manaus...
...Like its model in Buenos Aires, it is called Hebraica, and its Hebraic dimension typically may be identified less in its occasional Hebrew or Yiddish lectures, or performances of Jewish or Israeli music, than in the scope of its Jewish membership...
...Emissaries from the larger cities tend to be fundraisers, hardly ever teachers or rabbis...
...Ezekiel Shalom is his name...
...Our tradition is a very old one, you see," explained Marco Farhi, in his pellucid French...
...He had arrived in this abundant, easygoing land with a fanatical determination to succeed, and with a family legacy of mercantile experience...
...Currently, about 60,000 Jews are living in Sao Paulo, another 45,000 in Rio de Janeiro, 13,000 in Porto Alegre, 3,000 in Recife, with perhaps 1,000 each in Bahia, Belo Horizonte and Curitiba, and a few thousand others scattered elsewhere...
...As elsewhere in the West, exogamy is the price Jews and other ethnic minorities pay for an open society...
...The ambience was cordial, but restrained...
...Undoubtedly, these luxurious monuments to Jewish success, love of comfort and gregariousness serve their purpose in allowing young Jews to meet under convivial surroundings...
...Settling later in Sao Paulo, with its much larger Jewish population, Athias thereafter regarded observance as a matter of convenience no less than of principle...
...The CIP remained the prestige address for Brazil's Ashkenazic Jews...
...In addition to its domination of the Brazilian market, the company exports some $40 million worth of its products, and projects a goal of $100 million by the end of the 1980s...
...A slim, quietly dressed little man of 80, he sat in his modest office in downtown Sao Paulo and reminisced about the early years...
...Yet, in ensuing years, there has been a decline in both the quality of teaching personnel and the quantity of students...
...Yet even during the affluce 0f the 1960s and early 1970s, eD „ation's income was far from adeately distributed, and the lower 40 ' rcent of the population actually lost Jlund- Uncontrollable inflation was ^adily outstripping the modest rate 0f wage improvement...
...Once it had served as a major rubber center, the inducement that had brought Athias's father from Morocco as a young man and provided him with his livelihood as a broker of raw gum extract from the jungle's interior...
...Like their Syrian, Moroccan and Turkish predecessors, the Egyptians founded their own congregation, Mekor Chaim...
...Discreetly, most of them prefer to avoid the risk of ending up in the wrong camp...
...Public officials attend th< dedication of Jewish institutions...
...We were jewelry merchants in the old country," remarked Albert Jamus, a clone of Farhi in age and appearance...
...Today, it requires a helicopter journey to gauge the extent of the Feffer company's holdings...
...Wives and other womenfolk in the balcony murmured cozily to each pther...
...One of them is next to ours in Garuja-at the seaside...
...Plainly quite taken with himself, he was delivering the sermon in a Portuguese insipid enough even for me to grasp, and as readily to forget...
...But the Sephardim also remain generous to Jewish charities...
...Fully 30 percen of their children attended the Jewish day schools, a ratio much higher thai among the "European" Jews...
...Many of our people have become managers of banks, insurance companies, import-export houses...
...Lorch had an instinct for the appropriate officials to accommodate...
...At one point, the Klabins had almost gone bankrupt...
...The turnouts I had seen that morning were not unusual, friends assured me later...
...Crowned with an imposing silk biretta, the rabbi was intoning the week's scriptural portion...
...That is where we can still teach the Ashkenazim a thing or two...
...Isn't it true that since the beginning of the Diaspora we Jews haven't learned to live in an open society, haven't found the proper balance...
...The Sephardic synagogue, Mekor Chaim, is a spacious building, constructed in the traditional Near Eastern manner, with the dais in the center of the sanctuary...
...The various federations, congregations and Zionist organizations sponsor lectures, art festivals, occasional theatrical performances...
...had become the largest wholesale paper company in Sao Paulo, and one of the three largest in Brazil...
...But as intellectuals, they tend to gravitate to 'progressive'social causes...
...That night the Feffers left for Sao Paulo by train...
...As a retailer of paper goods in Sao Paulo, he did well enough to send funds home regularly...
...Some would not...
...As in other countries, too, the more isolated Jewish communi-ties-Belem, Belo Horizonte, Porto Alegre-are dying on the vine for lack of spiritual or cultural leadership, even for lack of Jewish contacts...
...Jn-deed, Athias and his friends conceded that they had more in common with the early Ashkenazic settlers than with many of the second wave of Moroccans...
...And, generations later, some would revert...
...Intermarriage" then signified a wedding of Sephardim and Ashkenazim...
...Located in the affluent Jardim Arnjj...
...Their association with the major Jewish organizations in Sao Paulo or Rio is limited to periodic confederation or B'nai B'rith meetings...
...Another 3,000 employees labor in the Feffers' huge integrated pulp-and-paper factory, and 1,300 in three smaller factories...
...The new regime was technocratic and pro-capitalist...
...A seven-story building, it is equipped with comparable facilities...
...But Max Feffer wondered if a chemical process might not be devised for bleaching the tree's shorter fibers...
...in Recife, the capital of Pernambuco, where 200 Jewish families currently live in a flourishing city of nearly a million...
...A millionaire again, Salama reappraised his opportunities...
...The Jews shared in that action...
...There's no middle ground here in Brazil...
...Nor could they be emj0yed without a permanent ^sidencc permit, and this was difficult to obtain...
...It was the Salamas' good fortune, as that of other Jews in Egypt, to claim a variet...
...In our synagogue, no man who marries a Gentile will ever be called to the Torah...
...Sentient to the usefulness of enterprising foreigners, the government reopened its doors to immigration and cordially received a second, larger wave of Lebanese-Syrian Jews...
...President of Sao Paulo's Zionist youth movement, vice-president of 'he Circulo Israelita, he rose in later yj^rs to the Presidency of the Zionist ^Sanization, then of the Sao Paulo Je*ish Federation, and finally of the "ational Confederation of Brazilian Jewish Communities...
...Farhi owned a chain of clothing stores Jamus owned a large textile factory...
...Sixty-two years old when we met in 1982, with a vast proboscis jutting aggressively beneath a flamboyant pompadour, he ventilated his misgivings amid clouds of cigarette smoke...
...By and large, the Germans avoided Sao Paulo's East European ghetto in Bom Retire and took up residence in the comfortable, middle-class Jardim America quarter...
...If only someone could instill in our people a feeling for the old Jewish ethical values, not the fake materialistic values of the Brazilian elite...
...Our social life is exclusively among our own...
...Fritz Pinkuss, and been a distinguished spokesman for Liberal Judaism in Germany...
...Of course, they were dressed to the hilt...
...Within the University of Sao Paulo, meanwhile, efforts to establish an "Interdisciplinary Center for Jewish Studies" have been less than successful...
...We flatly will accept no converts...
...Some 500 Jewish families lived in the vicinity in those early years, almost all of them Moroccan Sephardim, almost all as forthrightly Jewish as the Athiases...
...Currently, 'ess than 20 percent of the Jewish s|udents in Sao Paulo attend the immunity's seven day schools...
...A dark, heavyset man, he wore apin-striped cashmere suit...
...Still others maintain apartments in Israel and live there part of the year...
...Paulo was even then the locomotive pulling Brazil...
...Three years later, in an effort to combat Nazi influence among the large German enclave in the Rio Grande do Sul province, the Brazilian dictator curtailed foreign-language schools and cultural activities, and eventually banned foreign-language periodicals-German, Italian, Japanese among them...
...We'll cancel our appointments, then...
...at least a thousand congregants were present...
...Both the pulp and the paper manufactured from it proved to be of excellent quality...
...and in Salvador, the capital of Bahia, supporting 170 Jewish families in a population of 740,000...
...We were proud of our Sephardic heritage," Athias recalled, "but we were never snobs...
...Brazilians are too soft, too 'African,' for that kind of imported European phobia...
...They would intermingle, even "intermarry.' But they would never compromise their Jewish loyalties...
...In time, new Sephardic immigrants arrived, many of them settling in the northeastern provinces, and particularly in Belem...
...He did not work on commission, as his father had, preferring instead to rely on the market for his profits...
...We're active in our Jewish community...
...Israel's doors were open, to be sure, but the prospect of life in another poor country was not enticing...
...Why don't our fellow Jews follow the example of the Catholic Church, which sends missionaries here...
...Hard statistics on mixed marriages are nonexistent, but estimates range Most Brazilian Jews remain suspicious of populist democracy...
...The father was waiting...
...and technology for the state of Sao Paulo (and by common consensus wjj the ablest man ever to hold that post) His predecessor, Jose Mindlin, was also a Jew...
...Here he opened a furniture store in partnership with one Moises Hakim, an Egyptian Jew married to Athias's distant cousin...
...Salama's brothers and two of his sisters ended up in France...
...I corroborate that," declared lbrari Salama, vice-president of Brazil's Egyptian Jewish community council...
...Yet it is questionable if the club's charter members (Feffer, of course, preeminent among them) anticipated that this palacio ultimately would transcend the synagogue, federation, school or university classroom as the single most tangible manifestation of Jewish iden-tity in Brazil, other than Zionism...
...Ludwig Lorch, doyen of the German Jewish community, was opposed to the notion of an umbrella body in which German efficiency would be subordinated to ostjudisches Politik (and, he feared, to East European Zionism...
...He had anticipated the question...
...I watched the waiters staring at the food the guests left on their plates...
...The Jews drew an uncertain reassurance from these measures...
...Other Sephardic Jews had long since found their way to Brazil...
...By 1921, it accounted for half the nation's industrial output and was on the threshold of even more impressive growth...
...As drab as Rio was glamorous, Sao In 1937, the Vargas regime introduced severe restrictions on immigration-at the very moment that Jewish refugees were turning to Brazil for sanctuary...
...It was all very comfortable...
...He was born in the interior of Par4 at the opening of the century, 16 miles from the town of Belem, at the juncture of the Atlantic Ocean and the Amazon's southern estuary...
...Venturing into pulp production, the Klabins had chosen to build their factories at the source of supply, the pine forests of the state of Parana...
...There the proprietor of a Jewish boardinghouse gave the youngsters , afternoon lessons in Hebrew...
...Often their business experience was prized highly enough for Brazilian firms to take them in as managers or even as partners...
...The next step was to build new facilities...
...Numbering perhaps 2,000, the Moroccans tended to bypass Sao Paulo in favor of Rio de Janeiro, their Brazilian Casablanca...
...The political implications for Brazil are not encouraging...
...Sighing, he handed the letter back to his son...
...Benno Milnitzky knows his people...
...Even smaller businessmen were earning livelihoods that permitted a certain leeway for relaxation...
...We arrived after 1956, when Israel's campaign in the Sinai shook up our part of the world...
...With few exceptions, even the most acculturated Brazilian Jew remains closer to his Jewish roots than his second-generation Argentine Jewish counterpart...
...If Syrian and Egyptian Jews did not join, that was by their own choice...
...Working his way through night law school, Milnitzky soon afterward developed a respectable general practice...
...Their culture may be lower than ours, but they're hard workers and even richer than we are...
...The eucalyptus was not a long-fibered wood, the kind that normally was used to manufacture quality pulp...
...This was the eucalyptus tree, which grew in vast quantities near Sao Paulo...
...Walter Rehfeld, an early faculty member, put the issue succinctly: "We have thousands of Jewish students at the universities, hundreds of Jewish faculty, even a few deans...
...The world depression struck Brazil hard...
...In those days, there was even a separate Jewish burial society for the dozen or so madams of Sao Paulo's most popular brothels...
...I don't suggest that they move to the radical Left," he added quickly...
...Others of the Jewish immigrants brought skills as spinners and weavers, as tailors and seamstresses, as shoemakers and furniture-makers...
...One of these, Sao Paulo's Jewish old age home, is a facility worth seeing...
...Numbering 30,000 now, over a fifth of Brazilian Jewry, these Sephardic communities from the Balkan and Moslem worlds serve as the conscience of their fellow Jews...
...From the book Diaspora by Howard Sachar, to be published on April 30...
...Be modest in your personal demeanor...
...A spacious home, servants private schooling and European vacations were their way of life...
...In your social and communal lives, at least, try to set a standard of ethical values, of our historic prophetic values...
...Dignified in his late 70s, monolingual in Portuguese, he bore little resemblance to the stereotypical European Jew, living on his nerves and his languages...
...Perhaps they no longer drew narrow distinctions between Aleppines and Damascenes in this multiracial society, between Turkish, Balkan, Egyptian or Moroccan Jews...
...Two years later, Brazil's first constitution proclaimed toleration for all non-Catholics, and a marrano group in northern Pard thereupon declared its Judaism openly and established a synagogue in the town of Manaus, the nation's rubber capital...
...With our linguistic skills and business experience, we could always count on salaried jobs...
...You live among a desperately poor people...
...Reprinted by permission of Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc...
...In his native Alexandria, one did not dissemble about wealth, and his family had it...
...Only a few hundred of them arrived in the 19th century, essentially technicians, mining engineers, businessmen from Germany...
...Israeli ensembles perform quite often, before large audiences, and local Jewish groups enthusiastically participate in festivals with Israeli themes-particularly in Chanukah and Purim celebrations...
...Most of them do not seem fazed by a military regime that is benign by Latin American standards...
...To that end, he built his own plant and set about distributing the finished paper products through his already impressive network of wholesalers and retailers...
...Farhi was born in Damascus, moved to Beirut as a youth, then emigrated to Brazil in 1961...
...pie classroom and office space, an indoor swimming pool, two outdoor swimming pools, a score of tennis courts, as well as picnic and playground areas...
...To service this plant, however, it had been necessary for them to open new roads, to build housing and other facilities for the workers' families...
...Another appeal for an 'emergency' meeting tomorrow morning...
...A respectable number of cultural activities do in fact take place within the Hebraica's premises...
...It encouraged Brazil's transformation from an agrarian economy, based essentially on coffee, to an industrial one...
...Twenty years later, estimates of Jewish growth ranged between 120,000 and 150,000...
...He shrugged resignedly...
...We had a little money laid b] in Europe...
...Meanwhile, Brazil's small community of naturalized German Jews worked assiduously to help the refugees through the red tape, to find them employment and housing...
...Like him, Antoinette Tepperman was reared in an observant home...
...Brazilian Jews have long since developed political and social interests beyond their own community...
...Immigration restrictions were eased soon afterward...
...All is comparative...
...Established in 1948, "eventually became the second-largest congregation in Brazil...
...The multiple harassments drove a number of the refugees to suicide, among them the eminent writer Stefan Zweig...
...We'll intermarry with them now, but not with the Gentiles...
...Many of the latter gave their support to the Integralista Party, a collection of green-shirted ruffians who drew their inspiration from Italian and Portuguese fascism...
...In later ^ars, many Syrian and Rhodian Jews failed themselves of its ample facilities and well-trained Egyptian ^d Lebanese rabbis...
...If they were harassed by the police...
...If the newcomers had business experience, Lorch somehow negotiated credit lines for them at banks...
...He looked at me, awaiting confirmation...
...Most of the newcomers gained admission only by bribing Brazilian immigration offijals- Frequently they were obliged to continue paying bfackmail to corrupt o-betwcens...
...We purchased our own tickets to Brazil...
...Among students in any Diaspora community, they usually do...
...As early as 1942, Feffer's son Max, a trained engineer, had become intrigued by another source of pulp...
...Unlike the Sephardic congregation, formality was the rule here...
...Sao Paulo, as in Mexico City or Bjj...
...Since then, elections have taken place biennially...
...The son shook his head and departed...
...Congregants circulated, shaking hands with friends, chatting in a low undercurrent of mild cordiality...
...The enterprise went spectacularly well...
...Don't commit yourselves politically, if you're afraid to,' I | said...
...Leon Feffer remembers...
...They, too, had shifted the scale of their operations from the immigrant vocations of merchandising to large-scale manufacturing, the range of products extending beyond clothing and furniture to plasties, electronics, metals, chemicals, pharmaceuticals...
...Profits were high, jobs plentiful, as the government orchestrated the massive construction of roads, dams and power plants...
...With rare exceptions, they had achieved economic security by the end of World War II, and they continued to prosper afterward...
...Like many of his compatriots, he was drawn initially to the easygoing ambience of Rio...
...They're quite unself-conscious as Jews...
...Between them, the CIP and Rio's ARI temple alone perform over 100 conversions a year, even convert children of mixed marriages to enable them to have bar mitzvah ceremonies...
...The Jewish day schools were not for them...
...On a summer Sunday, as many as 10,000 Jewish Paulistas can be seen decked out here in swimming or tennis garb...
...Within 10 years, the workshop erew into a small factory employing 100 workers...
...I do mind that the openness of the society here has undermined our Jewish integrity...
...Jewish cultural activities come in a poor second...
...Childless, he watched in dismay as six of his nephews flourished there-and eventually married non-Jews...
...The influx gained momentum after 1921, once the United States restricted immigration...
...In 1957 the family completed its first pulp mill in Suzano, 30 miles from Sao Paulo...
...Imports into the country all but ceased with the outbreak of World War II...
...Their libraries and schools were also tightly circumscribed...
...Rehfeld's discouragement notwithstanding, Jewish culture is far from moribund in this land...
...Working from dawn to dusk in their tiny stores or workshops, they almost invariably saved enough to open larger retail establishments or small factories...
Vol. 10 • March 1985 • No. 3
