A Jewish scavenger hunt through South America

My husband has apparently received an unexpectedly high number of questions lately about whether his wife is Brazilian.

I am not Brazilian, (which I’m sure shocks you). I am, however, a proud product of a family that considers Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay a perfectly reasonable eight-day itinerary.

Many families do a beach vacation. Maybe a European city if they’re feeling bold. We did four countries, three planes, many car rides, and, at one point, a boat.

I had missed them deeply. It had been nearly nine months since we had seen each other, and I had been looking forward to this trip forever. Still, I expected seeing everyone again to feel strange. You know that specific, disoriented feeling you got when you were little and came home from sleepaway camp, and the house looked the same but somehow felt bigger and smelled different?

But it didn’t feel like that at all. It felt like stepping right back into what has always been normal. Siblings get a little taller, hobby fixations and current shabbat reading may evolve, but the basic family operating system does not really change.

We are the kind of family that, when traveling kosher, survives on food that is probably, though not definitely, still edible, and we simply do not complain because there is nothing to be done about it. We are the kind who are absolutely taking care of some work email or extracurricular responsibility on vacation. We are the kind who cannot pass up any kind of opportunity while traveling, because you are likely only getting one shot at this particular country in your life. And we are, very specifically, the kind who, if staying within striking distance of a border, must cross it, because how could you possibly leave a country uncollected?

Case in point: just after landing, we were staying near the Brazil-Paraguay border for one night only. So naturally, after a full day of activities and about twenty hours of travel, my dad, brother, and I decided that if this was our one shot at Paraguay, tonight was the night. Our hotel wasn’t even five kilometers from the border, and technically all that stood between us and a new country was a bridge over a river.

So, at dusk, we set off on foot through the outskirts of a Brazilian border town that got progressively sketchier by the block. We assumed there’d be some kind of border control, even crossing on foot. We got to one side of the bridge: no security in sight. We got to the other side: still nothing. No guard, no checkpoint, no passport control of any kind.

You literally just walk in.

The whole time, we were looking up fun facts about Paraguay, which is how we learned that this exact border region is apparently a well-known financing hub for Hezbollah, and that money spent there has a real chance of ending up somewhere I would very much not like to fund, particularly given that Hezbollah has spent the past few years (and longer) intermittently firing missiles at my actual country.

This was particularly useful information to acquire as we crossed, because one of the first things we encountered on the other side happened to be a mall. I would like to never, under any circumstances, be a line item in Hezbollah’s revenue report. And, frankly, without that important moral consideration, who knows how I could have resisted the temptation to go shopping in the Paraguayan mall?

The whole ordeal did leave me with a genuinely strange thought, though: we could never do this on an Israeli border.

That’s a shame. I’d love to collect those countries too, however dangerous, but alas, for now, it is an impossibility. (Story for another day, but I did one time cross from Israel into Jordan – not an experience I would want to replicate – which shows that unfortunately my country collection will need to wait a while for Egypt and Lebanon. But Cyprus is coming soon!)

The next day, we went to see some astonishingly absurd waterfalls. I would have expected them to be an Israeli tourist magnet, and yet we saw (and heard) almost no Israelis there at all.

My husband’s theory is that it’s cold there right now, and Israelis abroad migrate toward heat when traveling. (This, I’ve concluded, is the one part of me that will never fully go native. I love the cold, I was thrilled to be somewhere cold, and this was a big sacrifice I made to live in Israel.)

All in all, though, what struck me most was how relentlessly Israel follows you, no matter what country you are in. I’ll admit I was primed to notice it; I was half-consciously hunting for column material the entire trip.

You sit down for a hotel breakfast to enjoy the delicious variety of tasty kosher fruit at Iguazu Falls, and some part of your brain is already listening for the possibility of Hebrew two tables over. You go see Evita’s grave in Buenos Aires, and a few plots down is a giant crypt with the name Benjamin Breitman and a Star of David. You wander four more blocks and you’re squinting at Spanish signage, trying to work out which building is which Jewish institution. You learn that Uruguay’s Jewish community of about sixteen thousand gets most of its kosher products from Chile.

There’s something really fun about turning every trip into a small scavenger hunt for these details, tracking down the improbable little threads of Israeli and Jewish life scattered across a continent you didn’t expect to find them on.

Maybe that’s just me.

Maybe not everyone needs to know about the four conversos buried in an Argentine cemetery.

But I do. And my family agrees!