Jewish Footsteps Through Peruvian History: Part V

Welcome back to everyone who has been reading my series on the history of the Jews in Peru. We are leaving the big cities behind us, so strap on your seatbelts for this journey into the more remote areas.

In the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, as Jewish immigrants arrived from Turkey, some moved outside of the main cities we discussed previously and arrived in Ica, Tacna, Ancash, Cajamarca, Trujillo, and Cusco. Somehow, they also made their mark in the middle of the jungle.

The city of Iquitos in the Loreto region of Peru is situated in the middle of the Amazon Rainforest and is the largest city in the world unreachable by car. In fact, Iquitos can only be accessed by air or by river. The first Jew who arrived in the area was Alfredo Coblentz, a German Jew who arrived in 1880. Then in 1885, Moises, Abraham, and Jaime Pinto arrived as the rubber trade flourished by the Amazon River. Most of the Jews who followed were Moroccan Jews who had initially moved to the Brazilian parts of the Amazon in search of work within the rubber, gold, and timber industries of that region and as those areas became more settled, moved onto Iquitos.

In 1909, the Jewish Moroccan businessman Victor Israel established the Iquitos Charitable Society and eventually became mayor of Iquitos. As the rubber industry imploded many of the adventurers left Iquitos, but some men remained behind and had children with non-Jewish women. For many decades these descendants practiced some form of Judaism in one of the most isolated places on earth. In 1987, a few members of the community traveled to Lima for medical treatments and contacted Rabbi Guillermo Bronstein of the 1870 Masorti (conservative) synagogue for help in becoming a recognized Jewish community. Rabbi Bronstein, a man I have come to admire and learn from after meeting him various times over the years, visited Iquitos several times starting in 1991 and is almost single-handedly responsible for their eventual conversion and recognition as Jews, a process which took more than a decade. During that time, he sent them Siddurim, found a Mohel willing to travel there to perform dozens of circumcisions, and in 2002 along with Rabbi Claudio Kupchik of Temple Beth El of Manhattan Beach presided over the first communal Beit Din. In 2004, Rabbi Guillermo Bronstein along with Rabbi Marcelo Bronstein of New York and Rabbi Saferstein of Buenos Aires presided over a second Beit Din conversion process, and a third Beit Din in 2011, with a total of 284 conversions. Many of the newly recognized Jews made Aliyah to Israel, though not without difficulty.  Even though Masorti conversions are recognized by the Israeli government as qualifying for the Right of Return to make Aliyah, for marriage purposes many had to convert again through an Orthodox Beit Din when they arrived in Israel – a frustrating and painful situation for many. Up until 2016 there were still a few Jews left in Iquitos though the numbers are less clear today.

Over 800 miles away from the rainforest of Iquitos we arrive in the coastal desert region of Ica, made up of its capital also called Ica as well as the cities of Pisco and Chincha, where there were once fifty Jews in total. Dr. Samuel Geller, originally from Spain, moved to Ica where he spent several decades serving the local community as one of the few physicians in the area. In 1944, a synagogue was established by Salim Batushansky, but twenty years later all the religious objects including the Sefer Torah were donated to Jewish institutions in Lima as the community in Ica disappeared. In 1996, my father Marcos Chertman was president of the Peruvian American Medical Society and held the annual convention and medical mission in Ica. As a young child visiting Ica, all I knew about it back then was that our beloved nanny had been born in Ica and that the sand dunes made for messy but incredible fun. It would take me almost three decades to realize that the city where we had visited vineyards and where I had been dazzled by the most spectacular fireworks display as the PAMS conference came to a close, was also a city that held nearly unknown Jewish heritage.

Leaving the golden sand dunes and vineyards of Ica behind, a winding ascent up the Andean mountains some 250 miles away brings us to the city of Huancayo, the capital of the Junín Region and Huancayo Province. My father’s paternal cousin, Dora Seiner, married Felipe Krikler, and they both currently live in Israel. Felipe was born in Lima, but when he was five, his parents Samuel Krikler and Mina Fleischman, moved with him, his brother Miguel, and sister Sheva to Huancayo—presumably for economic opportunity—where they joined a tiny community of only five Jewish families. For most of his childhood, the Seiner home, located on the second floor above their textile store, served as the community’s designated place of prayer. Often there was no minyan, but for Yom Kippur, Jews came to Huancayo from nearby towns including Huanta, Jauja, Huancavelica, La Oroya, and Cerro de Pasco, or relatives in Lima would be sent for to ensure there were enough people for services. The children studied in a school run by Catholic nuns until they left for Lima to attend university, and over a period of likely less than two decades, that tiny Jewish community disappeared from Huancayo.

Though the number of Jews in Peru over the decades continued to dwindle to the approximate number of 2,000 currently, there have been many influential Israeli leaders who visited Peru in an official capacity including the previously mentioned Menachem Begin and Golda Meir who was then Israel’s Foreign Minister and was received by President Manuel Prado Urgateche in 1959, a close relative of a dear family friend Maria Prado de Moreyra. In 2001, Shimon Peres acting as Israel’s Foreign Minister, visited Lima and in 2014 Peruvian President Ollanta Humala visited President Shimon Peres and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem.

The small but dedicated Jewish community of Peru is currently located principally in Lima. There is a Kosher Minimarket, the one Jewish school Leon Pinelo, and 4 active Synagogues. Many of the youth have either made Aliyah or moved to the USA or Europe with hopes of better economic opportunities and in the effort to find Jewish spouses. Some return to Peru eventually, but many do not, and this has created demographic challenges that the community is always grappling with. Those of us, like myself, who were not even born in Peru but heard countless stories of the lives our families lived there, find ourselves inextricably connected to that country. I am a Jew who considers myself American and Peruvian, and am immensely grateful to have grown up with the best of both cultures. The Jews of Peru exemplify how Jews of various religious denominations become stronger and more effective advocates for themselves, for Judaism, and for Zionism, when they unite as one. It is a lesson we would be wise to learn from. They inspire those of us living in Jewish communities of any size and any level of affluence or lack thereof, to take on more leadership roles in our community and maintain an unshakable alliance to our people just as the Jews of Peru did and continue to do.

To each and every individual from Peru who shared their story with me, it has been an honor to learn from you and I thank you for giving me a glimpse into the history of your families.

For those of you looking to learn more, please see the references at the bottom of my first article in this series titled Jewish Footsteps Through Peruvian History: Part I.