Jewish Footsteps Through Peruvian History: Part IV
In my prior articles we explored Lima as the center of Jewish immigration to Peru, and in fact, if you meet any Jews today that are from Peru they will overwhelmingly be from the capital. But my family hails from a city 600 miles to the south called Arequipa. The 2nd largest city in Peru, Arequipa sits precariously close to the majestic Misti volcano and the deepest canyon in the world El Canyon del Colca where the condor swoops in and out of a sky perpetually lit by sunlight. It is the city I spent my childhood summers in, nestled in my maternal grandmother Clara Farladansky de Feldman’s home overlooking the Chile River. Hide and seek with my cousins was later replaced with music and tennis lessons as I grew, but throughout my childhood I knew we were the only Jews left in Arequipa and as an adult I began wondering how the community had started and why it disappeared.
Jewish immigration to Arequipa was highest in the 1920s. Some Jews who had arrived in Lima first decided to take their chances in the smaller city of Arequipa, looking for economic opportunity among less competition. Once there, they worked exhaustingly as merchants selling textiles or other goods from door to door. Eventually many were able to settle and rent or buy local stores. Among the notable names of Jews in the Arequipa community that eventually reached 30 Jewish families, or 100 total persons, were several of my relatives and close family friends including: my grandfathers Simon Chertman and Leon Miguel Feldman, as well as Moises, Raul and Simon Blanc, Victor Atun, Jacobo Fraiman, Arnoldo Kernitzky, Isaac and Marcos Kilimajer, Saul Mishkin, Elias Seiner, Luis Yaker, and Isaias Wolfenson. Rabbi Moises Brener was hired to come from Lima for special occasions, and a mohel from Chile came for Brit Milah’s. At first, religious services took place primarily in my grandfather Simon Chertman’s house, until 1936 when the synagogue was established on a street called Mercaderes. This was the one and only synagogue of Arequipa and endured several relocations, first to Calle Ejercicios and finally to El Portal de Flores near the central square. In 1936 Mendel Amsel brought a Sefer Torah from the United States for that synagogue. My mother recalls her father Leon was proudly Jewish but though her future father-in-law Simon frequently came by their house to ask Leon to join the minyanim, he only agreed to go if he was needed as the tenth man. Some children like my mother attended the private British Evangelical school, Colegio Internacional, from which students were exempt from religious studies. In 1940 Macabi Hatzair was founded as the youth movement while the adults congregated in their new multi-purpose organization called Circulo Israelita de Arequipa, located in Portal de Flores. My paternal great grandfather Jacobo Mizraji, originally from Bulgaria, became its president in 1944.
My family’s origins illustrate the complex genealogies that made up many families in Peru. In the 1920s my paternal grandfather Simon Chertman (originally Kertzman or Kertsman) came to Peru from Yedenitz (Edinet) in Bessarabia, which is in present-day Moldova. As a young man he had tried to defend his community during a pogrom and after killing an attacker in self-defense, fled the country disguised as a woman as a stow away on a ship that arrived in Peru. He eventually married Maria Mizraji Baruch who had been born in Bulgaria and moved to Peru with her parents as a child. Meanwhile my maternal grandfather Leon Miguel Feldman was born in 1905 in the village of Klitzkovitzy, inside the town of Khotin. This was part of the major city of Chernovitz in Bessarabia, which is now split between Ukraine and Moldova. He was orphaned as a young boy and made his way to Peru with a knapsack of his personal belongings searching for a new life. Years later while visiting Santiago, Chile he met his future wife Clara Farladansky, originally born in Argentina to Russian parents, and they made their lives together in Arequipa. Both sets of grandparents first began selling clothes door to door until they had just enough money to obtain a storefront in Mercaderes near the city center which is now a designated UNESCO world heritage site. The Chertman’s and Feldman’s were well acquainted with each other for many years before my mother and father met, their families’ lives intersecting as they each did their part to assist Jewish refugees from Europe.
Bolivia was the only country in South America who accepted Jews during WWII without limits, welcoming a staggering 20,000 German Jews from 1937-1940. The closest Peruvian city to the border of Bolivia was Puno, and some of the Jews who ended up in Bolivia first travelled through Peru on their way there. As a young child, my father Marcos Chertman remembers that many refugees came through his hometown of Arequipa and the local community helped pay for their hotel stays and hosted them for meals. His older sister Jeanette Mathilde Chertman fell in love with one such refugee. When he reached the border at Puno and was lacking the proper documentation and arrested, they called Jeanette’s father Simon Chertman who drove 8 hours from their home in Arequipa to Puno to pay the ransom so he could be released back to Arequipa. The man slept in the Synagogue for many weeks and ate meals at the Chertman home, until he left for good to attempt the border crossing again and left my aunt Jeanette heartbroken as she never heard from him again. Around this time there was a radio station in Arequipa called Radio Continental on which my aunt Jeanette, who was in the future to become a professional opera singer, started a weekly program where she spoke about Israel and sang Jewish music, accompanied by her mom Maria Baruj de Chertman who played the piano. Meanwhile my mother Raquel Feldman recalls that her father Leon Miguel Feldman was imprisoned by the authorities in Arequipa for his efforts in smuggling Jewish European refugees into and out of Arequipa. In fact, in 1938 my grandfather Leon was the president of the Arequipa chapter of the Comite de Proteccion a los Inmigrantes Israelitas, and together with my grandfather Simon Chertman, Marcos Kilimajer, and Herman Amsel they received the refugees by the port of Mollendo and then placed them on trains going to Arequipa or La Paz, Bolivia. The only Jewish family living in the coastal beach town of Mollendo were the Mitzianagorra’s who owned a store that was frequented by other members of the community when they vacationed there.
Though the entire Jewish community of Arequipa was made up of barely 30 families, they were so critical to saving refugees from the Holocaust that representatives of the Jewish Agency and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem visited Arequipa and were left astounded at the ardently Zionist community. The highlight was a visit by Golda Meir who not only came to Lima, but also to Arequipa, in 1959. At the time my father and his cousin Yisrael (Srulic) Yaker were both boarding at the Military Academy of Arequipa which they attended for high school and were normally not allowed to leave the school premises during the week. However, they received special permission to leave school and attend Golda Meir’s speech at the synagogue. The teenage boys walked in wearing their spotless military uniforms and joined the entire community in welcoming Golda, where she was granted an honorary degree from the only university in existence at that time, San Agustin University.
Over the coming decades, the tiny but mighty community eventually moved to Lima, which is why when I visited as a child, we were the only ones remaining. Every Yom Kippur, my grandmother Clara’s housekeepers fasted with her—not because they were asked to, but out of respect. One of them, whom we affectionately call Tía Vicky, still fasts on Yom Kippur to this day. Unsure of the correct date, she even fasted for two days in a row last year. In April 2025, when she took the first international trip of her life, Vicky chose to go to Israel to see the Promised Land my grandmother had so often described. And even though the last Jews of Arequipa moved to Miami in 2008—my grandmother and her son Efraín—the story of the Jews of Arequipa lives on.
