These Mestizo natives - residents of the Amazon basin and for the most part descended from early Jewish settlers, primarily from Morocco - had been practicing Judaism for over a century.  Yet there was something lacking in their lives for which they all thirsted.  They wanted to be fully recognized as Jews - a part of Klal Yisrael.  Beautifully articulated by the charismatic, Santiago, Chile-based Rabbi Roberto Feldmann (a 1994 ordainee of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati), this unedited narrative would be the envy of any novelist, but it is absolutely true.

 

Jerry Tanenbaum, Chairman, Yad B'Yad Task Force, World Union for Progressive Judaism

 

 

THE JEWS OF THE AMAZON RETURN HOME - THE STORY OF THEIR CONVERSION

By Rabbi Roberto Feldmann 

 

“There is no such thing as the first Jew in any given place.  There has always been one before.” Dr. Jacob Markus z"l

 

A blue orchid drifted on the putrid waters by the sidewalk. The airport of Iquitos behind us, we were three rabbis soaked in sweat at the bienvenida[1]. In front of us, along that sidewalk, more than two hundred men, women and children, from many of the most remote corners of the Peruvian Amazon, in their best clothes, sang Havenu Shalom Aleichem just for us three. Welcome to Macondo[2] -I thought to myself- knowing I was being engulfed by it myself. As we rode rapids of mixed feelings, I looked at these beautiful native faces, making eye contact. Their almond-shaped, yellow eyes were not so much radiating the song, as expressing a shy joy wrapped in a remote pride.

 

It seemed to me, they were having their own culture shock at us, at me. Instead of the three pompous clergymen disembarking from the monthly steamboat in Riohacha[3], three western rabbis in shorts and t-shirts, smiling and singing along, made away with the unnecessary rigidity. I walked over, trying to approach a smiling child. It shook hands and then ran away hiding behind their older sisters. -“We’ll see each other at the hotel” - shot a voice, and a circular stampede brought us to a van, then to a hotel.

 

This is the story of the conversion to Judaism of a number of descendants of the so-called Jews of the Amazon, that took place between December 26th and 28th, 2004, in Iquitos, Perú. Four rabbis, me among them, as well as a Mikvah lady, a Mohel and an historian, took place, among many other people who helped out in this historic endeavour.

 

There was barely time to leave our bags in our nice rooms. Guillo[4] wanted to start right away, realizing the enormity of our task ahead.
 

Fifty families were waiting in a large room, filled up with chairs and a table, where we three rabbis were supposed to sit and direct the Rabbinic Tribunal. The bureaucratic formality of it intensified as the morning hours became hotter. We pushed the table, the chairs and everything aside, and improvised a more amiable living room of chairs at a corner of the room, and made turns for these families to come in planned shifts, four each hour, non-stop for two and a half days, morning till evening.
 

- “Family Bensimón please” - Marcelo[5] would say by microphone, in a kind, loving tone, warming up the remainder of the waiting-room atmosphere of the setting.

 

We were feeling uneasy, swallowed somehow up in a legal formality that didn’t match our awareness that behind every name, every eyes, every voice and gesture, there was a four or six day boat ride from the deepest meanders of an Amazon affluent fishing village. More, there were years of returning to their Jewish roots, studying whatever material Guillo gave out in Lima, or Ronald[6] sent by boat mail. There were sacrifices, and a strenuous attempt to imbue themselves with a Jewish identity made out the residual. Latin America is a concoction of residues, a Frankenstein of shipwrecked identities that the jungle syncretizes in violent arrests of eros and tanatos.

 

But we were feeling uneasy also at the interviews and conversations themselves. Our subconscious sense of Jewishness continued unable to decode these people’s kindness, naïveté, and little intellectual knowledge, as Jewish. Indeed, the concept Jewish, swelled and shivered as in a spell or an equatorial fever: 

Is it them or us who define what’s Jewish enough to be embraced under the wings of Shechinah[7]? Can a sense of identity and belonging be assumed so far away from what –let’s say- modern, western Jews, understand and feel it to be? Am I a bigot or am I right? Am I being too laissez-faire? How high should the bar of Jewish knowledge be for these people, who are so unlike the already vast typology of persons who we had helped embraced Judaism before?

 

The Jews of the Amazon, descend from Moroccan Jews from Tangier, Tetuan, Fez, Casablanca, Rabat who came looking for a rubber El Dorado, in the “Fiebre del Caucho” or “rubber Fever” of the 1880s. They crossed the Atlantic in a less talked-about, southern version of the crossing of the Atlantic Ocean, towards Belem de Pará, Brazil, the mounding of the Amazon. From there, by boat, adventurous young men went up through the huge river, flanked by the largest tropical rainforest in the world, to search for fortunes. Their ambition did nevertheless not eclipse a stubborn sense of being Jewish. So when they either married Amazonian women, or simply spread their descent, they consistently insisted to their mestizo[8] children: “You are Jewish”. The same burning whisper crypto-Jews from Spain and Portugal had said in other corners of Latin America between the sixteenth and the eighteenth century. But the remember: you are Jewish had little tangible content and reference points, and therefore fantasy, imagination and Jewish objects brought to this distant shores, fused and blurred this identity into a tropical religious syncretism where the boundaries were lax and the contents as multiple and mythological, as the loneliness of individuals longing to express their you are Jewish could produce.
 

Ariel Segal, author of “The Jews of the Amazon: Self-exile in Paradise”[9] recognized me at once in Iquitos. “Haven’t we met in Jerusalem?” Indeed we had, at a guitar evening of South Americans in Jerusalem. He from Venezuela, me from Chile: the small world of Latin Americans in Israel. Thus we quickly made friends.

 

Ariel, as a PhD in Latin American history, had studied this diverse group and made his doctoral thesis on it. And just like me, who did my rabbinical thesis on a crypto-Jewish group in southern Chile, was so embedded in the experience that he somehow feels this place home. He is beloved by the people, young and old: Don Ariel is a teacher, and has lectured for those in Iquitos every time he has been there. An emotional being with a scientific mind, his subjectivity and personal involvement were impossible to refrain. Such is the rainforest: it transforms, blurs and mingles.

So did interviews and lunch: we nibbled on fried fish and banana tostones[10], and ran every couple of hours to change shirts, soaked in that amniotic liquid of the jungle which people call sweat. Unfortunately, plastic water bottles piled up empty for our thirst.

 

“Who are your Jewish ancestors?” was our opening question, which opened old streams of emotion, and the only one we repeated. “…Bohabot, Bendayán, Toledano, Assayac, Cohen, Levi, Nahmías, Sarfati, Azulay...my grandfather, my mother, her mother in turn... …my uncle and sister live in Beer Sheva, in Ashdod, in Arad, in Jerusalem… we want to join them…”
 

Again uneasy feelings: We are not Aliyah[11] clerks, but rabbis. Upon us is the task to certify these people are ripe for being Jewish, fully aware of what Judaism is all about, and willing to live Jewish lives. Yet every single ceremony they held opened and closed with a solemn Hatikvah[12]. I loved it, and yet it was a bit off-target for our task as rabbis. The sheer repetition of their dream to settle in Israel became awkward for our purpose of approving their conversion to Judaism, not first or foremost to Israelis, which is not our task.

 

How do you celebrate Pesach, Shabbat, Rosh Hashanah…? …Can you name some prophets, a Jewish philosopher? What’s a Chassid, a Sephardi, a Sofer, a Parashah? Do you pray, do you study at home…?  Standard questions received very strange answers. “I think a Chassid is one that is glued”, said one, awkwardly correct. (Dvekut, the state of total attachment to God, is central in Chassidism). Some confused Purim with Chanukah and a Mezuzah with a Menorah, and yet with a little help, strange old stories came out: “My mother lit the seventeen candles every first of December”… “… Since the leprosaria is open every day 9 to 6, I arrive always a little late for washing the hands and go to Friday Shabbat services here in Iquitos…”

“Tapir[13] is not kosher, but I don’t really know what is Kosher,” said a lady from Santa María de Nieva, six days away by boat into the deepest Amazon. And so the line between ignorance and different codes was, despite all our efforts, an uncertain line, adding up to our puzzle.

 

At some ignorance we smiled, at other kinds we felt awkward. Yet almost always, there was a surprising breakthrough. A rather marginal Jewish symbol opened a gateway for an elaborate delirium of a stubborn Jewish observance, which was not really Jewish. Or was in their terms? – “Marcelo, aren’t we here to ensure it’s Judaism according to our understanding? –Of course! - But then, they know they are Jewish, yet they ignore some basics. –“Aren’t we a nemesis of those who had the dreadful idea to twist Ethiopian Jews into a second conversion? - Of course not! - Are we just demanding the standards for Klal Israel[14]? -  Of course we are! - Is this devotion and steadiness enough? - Of course not!… - and so our own parameters and standards underwent a soul-searching about our of course’s and of course not’s during and after the dialogues went on, soaked in sweat and mixed emotions. Weren’t we Fitzcarraldos[15] forcing our rabbinical ship through this lush rainforest of local-bred Judaism? Was it all fair? And then, crucially, we interviewed some people who had little knowledge of reading and writing, yet made enormous efforts in order to affirm their Jewish identity in their own so difficult context. Isn’t anthropology an issue here? …Jewish identity?… And our own tiredness, at the intensity of it all made it more complex. We were as much searching for our own centre as Bet Din, as they were trembling to approve it.

 

From this desk, in a cooler, drier and more rational place, two weeks away, the answers may appear clearer. Yet to be there, exposed to a whole universe of local Judaism in its own salsa, feels very different. Peripheral Jewish aspects become central, and central tenets of Judaism become blurred in history, interpretation and fantasy.

Yadin, yadin[16], (to judge, to judge,) - the old classic formula of the rabbinic role- was much more complex than it appeared to us before. Yet it is our responsibility. A huge responsibility, one that changes lives and generations. It was challenging us. Isn’t Judaism a way of interpreting Torah, God’s word? Isn’t it a jungle of interpretations anyway?

 

To make it even harder, reports of an orthodox nationalist Jewish preacher urging these people to settle in Kiryat Arba[17], Hebron, made us aware of a possibility for them that made our role as progressive Jews even more compelling, urgent. Our abstention could lead to a sin of omission, to a vacuum to be filled by a nationalistic, arrogant and humiliating Judaism, which may corrupt all we stand for as liberal Jews. We made it very clear that we were not signing the certificates for them to end up in a trailer on a Judean hilltop, thus blocking a peaceful, secure and democratic Israel, hopefully alongside a future peaceful Palestinian state. Danger loomed there as well.

 

As the hours passed, we also saw both how important and how partial progressive Judaism became for these people. Reform Judaism was so near and yet so far away; a possible lifesaver, perhaps an antidote for spiritual malaria.

 

Rabbi Rubén Saferstein arrived late Monday in Iquitos. He heads the Introduction to Judaism department of the conservative Seminario Rabínico Latinoamericano in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He had previously done the hard work of filling all the certificates with the names and data, for all the people. His signature was crucial, since rabbis Marcelo and Guillermo (Guillo) Bronstein are brothers, therefore unfit for signing both the same document, since that wouldn’t be a correct testimony in Jewish law.
 

Reform rabbi Marcelo Bronstein came from New York with his daughter Dana, - the [18]Tavlanit, or Mikvah lady for the women’s Tevilah, -the ritual immersion in water-. Rabbi Guillermo Bronstein, a right-wing conservative rabbi, came from Lima, Perú, and was the Mara de Atra[19]. He came along with Dr. David Schneiderman, the Mohel[20], to perform the Hatafat Dam Brit[21]. And I, also a reform rabbi, came from Santiago de Chile. So we four rabbis were also expressing the excellent cooperation between reform and conservative here in Latin America at least. 

 

Each and every human being we interviewed had a brief yet meaningful conversation with us. Minutes to talk to each other’s eyes, to drill into the essential, to turn the imperative you are Jewish of their ancestors into a question in its full, awesome weight: Do you really want to be Jewish? Do you understand what it means, what it ensues, what it takes? The question rebounded on us, and fragmented itself into a thousand questions.

 

Monday afternoon, we went in buses to a lagoon not far from Iquitos. Dana Bronstein went with the women and girls. And we rabbis went to a distant place with the men and boys. Not everyone knew how to swim, let alone immerse himself without swallowing water. They all did it nevertheless.

 

A young man Tuesday evening at the closing ceremony came pale and sweating. I asked him whether he felt all right. He said a phrase that seemed taken from a Gabriel García Márquez story, which I won’t forget. “Never mind about my malaria, rabbi; it’s the natural price for me finally becoming a Jew. I am just so happy.”
 

This will be most probably the last conversion of the Jews of the Amazon. Weary of people with other purposes in mind, I asked Ronald Reategui Levy, the president of the Jewish Community of Iquitos about it. He said: “Here in Loreto (the Amazon district of Peru) we all know each other. We know who is of Jewish descent”. 

 

Tuesday evening, after the girls presentation of Israeli dancing, after our speeches in an unbearably hot and humid evening; after delivering the certificates one by one, wishing us Mazal Tov one another, dining fish and tostones, changing addresses and receiving beautiful redwood presents; after posing as brides for hundreds of pictures and of course, singing the final Hatikvah, we said farewell.

 

Today, I feel I helped, and performed a Mitzvah. It is one greater in scope than my limited human understanding, yet not to my intuition, which tells me that blessings will come out of this experience: I could help some Jews to return home.

 

Rabbi Roberto Feldmann is spiritual leader of Congregation Yakar in Santiago, Chile

---

[1] Bienvenida: Welcoming of somebody.
[2] Macondo: The mythical village appearing in many novels by Nobel Prize awarded Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez. Macondo is the living symbol of the eros and tanatos, the quintessential Latin America, its haunting, marvellous and decadent fate, as well as its mystery, decrepit grandeur and tropical surrealism.
[3] Riohacha: River port at the Guajira peninsula in northern Colombia, where Gabriel García Márquez (see above) describes how the once a week arrival of a bishop on the steamboat turns into an event of lyric proportions.
[4] “Guillo”: Nickname for my friend Guillermo Bronstein, a conservative rabbi serving the 1870 congregation in Lima, Perú, educator and monitor for the introduction to Judaism course for the converts in this article.
[5] Marcelo: First name of my close friend and rabbi whom I worked with at the same congregation in Santiago, the Chile, until he moved to New York He is currently rabbi at congregation Bnai Jeshurun, in the Upper West Side of Manhattan, New York.
[6] Ronald: Mr. Ronald Reategui Levy, president of the Comunidad Judía de Iquitos, Perú. 
[7] Shechinah: The Divine Presence, under whose wings – in a beautiful imagery - proselytes found shelter among the Jewish people. To convert to Judaism is to “ingress under the wings of the Shechinah”.
[8] Mestizo: racially mixed between native and white, here, in the Amazonian Jews’ jargon,  meaning mixed between Jew and Amazonian native. 
[9] “JEWS OF THE AMAZON: Self-Exile in Paradise”.  Book by Venezuelan Jewish author and reporter, Ariel Segal, PhD in Latin American History. The book, written by him according to his doctoral thesis, was published by the Jewish Publication Society, JPS, Philadelphia, in 1999.
[10] Tostones. Crashed and fried banana chips, made of green banana, or plátano maduro.
[11] Aliyah: Lit. Elevation. The realization of the Zionist goal of going to live in the State of Israel. 
[12] Hatikvah. Israel’s National Anthem.
[13] Tapir: Tapirus Terrestris. An endemic South American mammal, from the family of the Proboscides, and similar to a large, robust wild swine.
[14] Klal Israel. The community of the whole of the people of Israel, the Jewish people.
[15] Fitzcarraldo. Explorer and megalomaniac who while transporting a ship painstakingly over and Amazonian hill to the next affluent killed many Amazonians. A film by Werner Herzog, equally ruthlessly, portrayed him doing this.
[16] Yoré Yoré, Yadin Yadin… Classical formula inscribed on a Smichah, or official rabbinical title, blessing the rabbi to perform his duty of teaching Torah and setting jurisdiction in Halachic, or legal terms.
[17] Kiryat Arba. Site of deep historical importance to Jews, since it is the burial site of all the patriarchs and matriarchs, except for Rachel. Nowadays in the Israeli occupied West Bank,  it has a four-hundred strong community of highly nationalistic and orthodox Jews, who see themselves as “redeemers of the soil” and oppose the inclusion of this place in a future Palestinian state.
[18] Tavlanit: A woman who certifies the correct immersion and pronouncement of the appropriate blessings of a proselyte.
[19] Mara de Atra. Aramaic for “lord of the place” or host rabbi of the local Bet Din or rabbinical tribunal of his town.  
[20] Mohel. The Jewish performer of Brit Milah, or covenantal circumcision, and Hatafat Dam Brit, or the extraction of the covenantal drop of blood, when a clinical circumcision is already present in the male proselyte’s body
[21] Hatafat Dam Brit. Extraction of a covenantal drop of blood, a procedure that renders a clinical circumcision into a religious one, thus incorporating the man into the Covenant of Abraham.

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