The community’s rebirth began with the 1990 revival of the Sociedad de Beneficencia Israelita de Iquitos by community member Víctor Edery in response to his own personal desire to rekindle Jewish community life in Iquitos among the remaining practicing families. Without a Torah or other sacred texts, a solvent community fund, much collective knowledge of Jewish ritual outside the home, or a synagogue, the new community officers and the thirty-three members they represented felt outside help was needed to make a group of individual families of varying levels of independent practice into a cohesive community. They wrote letters to the Lima community asking for such help, and reached two important figures: the Argentinian-born Conservative/Masorti rabbi Guillermo Bronstein and Federación Sionista del Perú member Debora Frank. While current members of the community remember little of Debora Frank, Guillermo Bronstein continues to be active in the community, despite recent illness. It is already notable that Edery and the community sent these letters to a non-Peruvian rabbi and an Israel-focused organization as well as to Lima. The Iquitos community, which, despite its isolation,hydroponic net pots has always been diasporic by virtue of being Jewish, realized that a transnational action was needed to get the support they desired, and did so through intra diasporic networks.
Although Lima’s community of 1,900-2,000 Jews is by far the largest and closest Spanish-speaking Jewish community in Peru , internal dynamics, such as colorism and citified prejudice against far-flung Loretanos, made Lima’s Jewish community a less viable option for aid, which explains why the letter moved from the Limiñosynagogue to Bronstein and the Federación Sionista. Meanwhile, transnational forces in the Jewish diaspora ensured that international institutions like the Conservative/Masorti movement and pro-Israel organizations like the Federación were most likely to respond. A jump from Lima to Argentina is also unsurprising; Argentina boasts South America’s largest Jewish community, at 180,300 individuals , with attendant resources. Rabbi Bronstein’s connection to the Conservative/Masorti movement is significant, as it is linked to member synagogues throughout the world, including Israel, and has strong relations with the Jewish Agency for Israel , an organization relevant to the post-2011 Iquiteño experience. When the Iquitos community broke its long isolation, it reconnected itself to the webs of organizations that crisscross the Jewish world. The organizations that were most eager and financially ready to engage with the Iquiteño community, therefore, were institutions that centered Ashkenazi practices and the modern state of Israel as foundational to Jewish identity writ large, which thought of diaspora as requiring transnational integration. At this point, it was practically certain that the influence of Israel-focused groups, who make up a significant percentage of Jewish philanthropic organizations working internationally, and Ashkenazi groups, where there is the most money and influence, would have an out sized impact on the future of Iquitos. Bronstein especially responded with alacrity, encouraging the Iquitos community to draw up congregational statutes and begin to observe various major holidays.
He also reached out to his contacts in Buenos Aires, Miami, and New York. Among them was Ariel Segal, then a PhD student at the University of Miami, who visited Iquitos in 1995 and involved himself intimately in projects to convert Iquiteños and help them make aliyah. Meanwhile, Debora Frank made the Iquitos community familiar to the Federación Sionista, which boasted many connections to Israeli officials and other Zionist groups across South America. The stage was set. The impact of this is immediately visible in the circumstances of the two first mass conversions in August 2002 and December 2004. Rabbi Bronstein, in a 1993 letter reproduced in full in the fifth appendix of Ariel Segal’s book, argues that conversion should be granted only to “those who pledge to make aliyah” and who will undergo a second, Orthodox, conversion once in Israel.10 From the very beginning, then, not only was emigration to Israel dependent on conversion, but conversion was dependent on emigration to Israel. To be as clear as possible: in order to make a spiritual commitment, a practical action was seen as necessary. In order to make a practical move, a spiritual commitment was necessary. Regardless of whether these migrants continued to practice as they were taught in Israel, a question that is beyond the scope of this thesis but which deserves attention, it is clear that mixing together transitional actions with religious and diasporic identity was useful to actors invested in a particular transnational outcome. The conflation of Jewish identity and Israeli citizenship in Iquitos begins to show itself most clearly here, with no thought to standards of living, improved education, or other practical concerns. The practical and the religious converge here, and they do so because transnational activity was used as proof of diasporic conviction.
Segal speculates that the emigration stipulation was meant to weed out those who were not sufficiently devoted to Judaism, a concern that appeared again and again in my interviews, ironically twisted to a fear that some individuals would “fake” a conversion in order to emigrate. The state/institutional level, therefore, allows us to understand that,blueberry grow pot for the first several years of the Iquitos community’s revitalized existence, Jewish education, community support, and conversion depended on external institutions which happened to strongly support connections between Jewishness and Israel. Before examining the individual/community-level through data from the interviews Iquiteño Jews and I conducted in 2016 and 2019, I wish to remind readers of the timeline of this community. While states and major international organizations were instrumental in setting up the initial conditions for conversion and migration, they no longer play as important a role in influencing the individual decisions Iquiteños make in response to global or personal factors. Between the second conversion, in December 2004, and the third, in August 2011, there was a great shift. The presidency transferred to the Abramowitzes and the synagogue moved into its current location in 2009, and leadership attitudes towards conversion and migration have practically reversed — a notable change and one that proves, in case there was any doubt, that despite strong interference from non-Iquiteños, a great deal of the changes happening there come from within the community. “I do not want people to see us as a travel agency,” Señora Francisca Abramovitz told me sharply over lunch one afternoon. The de facto female leader for the community, Sra. Abramovitz is also the primary bookkeeper, synagogue caretaker, programming coordinator, outreach specialist, Internet publicist, and general macher of the Iquitos community. She makes the arrangements with the rabbis, solicits donations for, selects, and distributes prayer books and Hebrew primers, sets up the synagogue for services and cleans it up afterwards, conducts the entrance interviews for people interested in joining the synagogue, organizes outings and children’s classes at the synagogue in everything from liturgy to karate, collects and records dues and donations received, and reaches out to Jewish youth groups in Argentina to come visit. Although she and Sr. Abramovitz are technically two of the five-member Directiva , they do almost all the work of maintaining the community’s organized behaviors themselves. Congregants often refer to them as a unit simply as “la Directiva” or “los presidentes.” Sra. and Sr. Abramovitz are also the intermediaries between individual congregants and the rabbis of the Batei Din and the Jewish Agency for Israel, which currently handles the emigration paperwork for Iquiteño olim.
The process is not easy, and Sra. Abramovitz’s travel agency remark came at the end of a long demonstration of the mountains of complex paperwork involved in journeying from non-affiliated Iquiteño to new Israeli citizen. If one does not know the community’s history with Israeli immigration, the option seems no better than emigrating to, say, the United States or Argentina if gain is the primary motivation. Nonetheless, the fear that people might be taking advantage of Sra. Abramovitz’s hospitality —the synagogue, after all, is literally inside her home— and fierce Jewish faith to simply pursue a selfish financial end permeated many of our conversations.They must find it, first of all, and then make it past Sra. Abramovitz’s entrance interview. Then, there is an application to become a “Miembro Activo de la Asociación Judía de Beneficencia y Culto de Iquitos”. The new members must then take classes in Hebrew, liturgy, and “Jewish life,” and regularly attend Friday night and holiday services, as well as other community events, for at least two years. This educational programming is done in conjunction with Rabbi Bronstein and Rabbi Rubén Saferstein of Buenos Aires, who began his involvement with the Iquitos community in 2004. These two rabbis, and a rotating cast of others, eventually conduct a formal conversion in the Masorti tradition, complete with a brit for the men, and present the new converts with a stamped and signed certificate of conversion, a shtargeirut. Those who wish to make aliyah must provide three copies of that document, their birth certificates, passports, and National Identity Cards and those of their spouses and children, certificates of completion for all the classes they have passed complete with syllabi, their marriage records, proof of circumcision for the men, and a letter from the presidents affirming that they have been “good and active participants” in the community. That enormous packet of documentation passes from the Abramovitzes to the Jewish Agency for Israel, and then, through some alchemy that the Abramovitzes themselves do not fully understand, to the Israeli Bureau of Immigration, where applications are tentatively approved or denied. Potential olim must then travel to Lima, a matter of either an expensive plane flight or a days-long journey by boat and bus, to be followed by an also-expensive stay of multiple days in the capital, for an entrance interview. Only then may they officially be granted Israeli citizenship and have their travel and resettlement expenses taken on by the state. Those with family already in Israel may choose to live near them; those without are settled according to the dictates of the state. Most in the latter category are sent to the mixed Jewish-Arab city of Ramla. All this, and even then, theolim and their children will need to undergo a further, Orthodox conversion to access the full rights of an Israeli citizen11 and may also be required to serve in the Israel Defense Forces. At the time of writing, this process is for people who very likely have practiced a form of Judaism for much or all their lives, identify as Jews, have Jewish parents , and frequently have relatives already living in Israel. If this is a travel agency, it seems like one of the most redundant, possibly insulting, and certainly difficult tours I have ever heard of. Why do this? In 2002 and 2004, aliyah was a prerequisite to conversion. That is no longer the case; converts in 2011 and 2018 made no such commitment. Sra. Abramowitz ensured that this would no longer be the case, hoping that it would prevent more Iquiteño Jews from leaving Perú. On the one hand, if migration is undertaken for practical personal gain, why undergo a long, difficult, expensive, and, frankly, annoying process to go to a country where one does not speak the language and may not be able to control even where one lives? On the other, if aliyah is undertaken out of a deep spiritual desire to connect with a particular facet of perceived Jewish identity, why submit to the indignity of being told your Jewish practice is insufficient, inauthentic, and invalid? Although not in as many words, these were the questions I posed to my interviewees in 2016 and 2019. It is in the content of Iquiteños’ responses and the eagerness with which they gifted them to me that I have found something approaching an answer. I argue that, despite changes in leadership conversion method over a long period of time, Iquitos’ Jewish education has always conflated Jewish authenticity with Israeli citizenship because of its early influence by the Federación Sionista, Rabbi Bronstein, and Ariel Segal, creating an environment that suggests the endpoint of a successful conversion is aliyah. Furthermore, there is now a self-sustaining transnational dynamic between immigrants from the 2002 and 2004 conversions now living in Israel and friends and relatives in Iquitos. Lastly, when deciding whether to migrate or not, Iquiteños do not draw clear distinctions between practical and spiritual reasons for migration, because those pro-Israel individuals and institutions framed Israel as central to a valid diasporic Jewish identity.