Jewish Footsteps Through Peruvian History: Part II
In part I of this journey, we met the German Jewish immigrants – they founded the first formal Jewish organization, the first cemetery, and the first synagogue in Peru. But soon after their arrival, starting in 1910, a group of Sephardi Jews arrived in Peru primarily from the Ottoman empire including modern day Turkey and the Balkans. By 1925, these Sephardi Jews had founded their own organization, the Sociedad de Beneficencia Israelita Sefaradi, and by 1933 had inaugurated their own synagogue in a neighborhood ironically called Jesus Maria. In the early 2000s, the Sephardi synagogue was moved to its current location in San Isidro and was renamed Bet Haknesset Rabi Abraham Benhamu after one of its longest serving rabbis of five decades who emigrated from Morocco to Peru in 1968 and still serves as rabbi emeritus.
In parallel, in 1912, the first Ashkenazi Jews began arriving in Peru. By 1923, Samuel Eidelman founded the Ashkenazi organization called Union Israelita del Peru where they preserved Yiddish and Ashkenazi customs, founded the first Jewish library in Peru in 1926, and the first Hebrew school for children in 1931. In 1933, Aron Lerner gifted a Sefer Torah and hired Rabbi Moises Brener from Poland who served as Mohel, Shochet, and Chazzan for several decades. Years later, they inaugurated a new synagogue called Sharon, which is the single surviving Ashkenazi Orthodox synagogue in Peru.
In the 1930’s, the Peruvian government severely restricted European immigration as the political leadership became increasingly hostile to Jews. They argued that indigenous Peruvians moving from the provinces to the cities deserved the work more than immigrants did and those Jews who did arrive paid exorbitant amounts of money for the necessary visas. They also required a baptismal certificate as a prerequisite to enter Peru along with proof of employment and a deposit of 8,000 Peruvian Soles currency. Quite obviously, these baptismal certificates were forgeries and paying off the authorities to turn a blind eye became a necessity. In 1935 during this difficult time, the Comite de Proteccion a los Inmigrantes Israelitas al Peru was founded by the Peruvian Jews to help obtain visas for Jewish refugees and help them find jobs once they arrived, led by Leopoldo Weil. Unfortunately, there were dozens of magazines, periodicals, and radio stations in Peru that espoused antisemitic ideas, as did the ministry of Foreign Relations.
Though the Peruvian government had forbidden its European embassies to issue visas to Jewish refugees since 1938, Mr. Jose Maria Barreto, the Peruvian diplomat serving in Switzerland, defied orders and issued at least 58 Peruvian passports to Jews. He was caught in 1943 and dismissed from his position which ended his career. Many decades later, after his death, he was recognized for his valiant work saving Jewish lives by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations. One notable refugee who immigrated during that restrictive period was Theo Buchwald who founded and directed Lima’s first National Symphony Orchestra. Another refugee, the archeologist and sociologist Dr. Hans Horkheimer, decided to live in Trujillo when he was offered a professorship at the university there and became the foremost expert in the pre-Incan Chancay culture. During World War II, the young Madeliene Truel who had been born in Peru to French Jewish immigrants went back to France where she worked with the Resistance as a document forger saving many people, but she was eventually caught and killed by age 41. The father of Peru’s future president Pedro Pablo Kuczynski also came to Peru as a Jewish refugee from Germany during the war.
The book Walter’s Welcome was compiled as a translation of the letters sent back and forth by Walter Neisser, a German-Jewish immigrant who arrived in Lima in 1927 and subsequently brought about 50 of his family members to Peru from 1933-1940, rescuing them from certain death in Europe as the Nazis came to power. He had somehow made friends with the Peruvian elite, became a Mason, and though he was initially an employee of a German electrical company, by 1933 he had managed to make his own business called Neisser & Co. which ended up being the sole provider of electrical power bought by the state. This position proved very lucrative and powerful, and Neisser used those tools to buy visas, forge baptismal certificates and other documents, pay bribes, provide employment, and do whatever was necessary to bring his family to Peru.
In 1940, the German, Sephardi, and Ashkenazi communities made an agreement to successively administer and share the costs of the maintenance of the Jewish cemetery, which until then had belonged to the German 1870 community. As the tragedies in the Holocaust started becoming apparent, the leaders of all the different Jewish organization in Peru realized they would be more effective advocates for themselves under a unified voice. In 1942, the president of the Union Israelita del Peru, Mr. Max Heller, invited the various leaders of the Sociedad de Beneficencia Israelita Sefaradi and the German group, Sociedad de Beneficencia Israelita 1870, to a meeting where they unanimously formed one cohesive organization initially called La Colectividad Israelita del Peru, later renamed the Asociacion Judia del Peru (AJP). The small Jewish community realized what many much larger communities have yet to realize today: together, they are stronger. The Jewish factions united in solidarity to do everything possible to help Jewish refugees from the Holocaust, to communicate with Jews far away from the capital in the provinces, and AJP became the official representative of all Peruvian Jews before the Peruvian government. The monies raised by the association were distributed to the victims of war, various Zionist charities, and local needs in Peru. The AJP also founded the Hogar de Ancianos, a residence for the elderly, which still exists today and is also known as El Bikur. Though not many Jews managed to enter Peru during the war due to all the difficulties mentioned above, towards the end of the 2nd World War, there were about 4,000 Jews.
In 1946, the AJP founded the first and only Jewish school in the country, Leon Pinelo, which is still a successful and academically rigorous Jewish school today, though it was relocated several times until it arrived at its current location on Maimonides Street. The school was named in honor of Diego León Pinelo who had been the rector of the San Marcos University between 1656 and 1657. It is unclear if Diego Leon Pinelo was himself Jewish, but history indicates that he was the grandson of a Portuguese Jewish merchant, Juan Lopez, who together with his wife, were burned alive at the stake in Lisbon in 1595 for being Jewish. The school was run for many years by the scholar of Peruvian Jewish history Leon Trahtemberg, who’s books I reference in this article. There are currently 300 students in this tri-lingual, pluralistic, Jewish school. Cementing the strongly Zionist nature of the Jewish Peruvian community, after completing 11th grade, all the students travel to Israel for a special educational program. Currently, Tuti (Fortuna) Levy de Atun is the president of the school board of Leon Pinelo. She is only the 2nd woman in its history to be its president and has helped guide the school on its path to its current International Baccalaureate status.
Zionism has served as a unifying thread in the community since the 1920s—a topic we’ll dive into in Part III. Stay tuned.
