Uruguay, a small country nestled between the huge territories of Argentina and Brazil on
South America’s Atlantic coast, doesn’t have
a large, active Jewish community and is not a

common destination for Jews . But we were “in the neighborhood” anyway, visiting shochtim and examining the famous South American slaughterhouses of the region, so we took the opportunity to scout out Jewish finds in this tranquil, warm, verdant country.

There were three things that brought us to Montevideo, Uruguay’s capital: One was our relationship with the country’s current chief rabbi, Rabbi Ben-Tzion Spitz. Second was our close friendship with the former chief rabbi, Rabbi Eliyahu Birnbaum. Rabbi Birnbaum, a native of Uruguay who is today an educator and dayan with Jerusalem’s chief rabbinate, is often a traveling partner on our “halachic adventures.” The final draw was an opportunity to share the adventure with a friend from the US, a rabbi who has been involved with supervision of the kosher slaughterhouses in the area for many years, who agreed to time a visit of his with our planned trip. Figuring that Rabbi Spitz could put us in touch with some interesting local characters to get a sense of the local Jewish history and customs, we hit the ground running in order to start exploring.

mesor ah

Meat and Memories in

We’d heard that there was a crypto-Jewish community in Uruguay dating back to the 1700s, but although the evidence was paltry, we did find a dwindling modern community led over the years by a series of dedicated rabbis doing their best to put

the brakes on assimilation. One thing you can’t deny though — the friendly Jews holding their kehillah together make the best barbecues ever

Sitting Together Rabbi Spitz has a tough job. For a chief rabbi in a country where intermarriage is rampant, the halachic issues of marriage, divorce, and conversion create a set of unique problems. If a divorce needs to take place, a beis din is flown over from Argentina to implement it. And because intermarriage and non- halachic conversions are common, many people who’ve been actively part of the community for years consider themselves Jewish when in fact they aren’t — often discovering that fact when they move to Israel and need proof of lineage from the chief rabbinate if they want to marry.

The main community shul is in the old center of the town, in a big building with a large sanctuary from the kehillah’s heyday. Today, it has that old musty sort of smell from many years of the same carpet and little change. During our visit, the main sanctuary was dark, lonely, and empty, but the rest of the building was all abustle with activity. Rabbi Spitz escorted us around the large building where we saw signs announcing upcoming events including various Israeli dance groups, a Yiddish theatre, a Yiddish club, various volunteer groups such as Bikur Cholim, a well- stocked clothing gemach, and an extremely active group for disabled people that includes catering, Jewish gift production, and light assembly work.

The majority of the Jews no longer live in the old Jewish neighborhood of the

For a chief rabbi in
a country where intermarriage is rampant, the halachic issues of marriage, divorce, and conversion create a set of unique problems

“centro,” so there is no minyan in the main shul, and in any event, the rabbi’s abode is not near there either. He lives near a small but vibrant Orthodox synagogue that is part of the Jewish school complex. Like all of South America’s Jewish institutions, both are heavily guarded since the Iranian bombing of the Jewish community building in Argentina back in 1994. We accompanied Rabbi Spitz to the Yavneh school for Minchah and Maariv, where we joined what seemed to be a particularly large crowd.

F6. 1. Accountant Itche Margulies F3. has archived every Yiddish

What was going on here? Rabbi Spitz
explained: When Rabbi Eliyahu Birnbaum
arrived in 1992 to assume the role of chief
rabbi, he observed that while funerals were
well attended by many of the nonreligious,
who showed great respect for the dead
and the mitzvah of burial, few people
were properly observing shivah or any
mourning rituals. As a means of enhancing
observance and involving people in the
community, he “transferred” the shivah
from the home of the niftar to the shul.
Family members might still not be sitting
shivah halachically, but this way they are
attuned to the shivah week and do engage
in some form of mourning. The entire
family of mourners and their friends come
to shul for all three tefillos the entire week,
where the mourners light candles, say
Kaddish, and hear the rabbi speak about
the deceased and give strengthening
words of Torah. This innovative idea has
proven itself: Today in Montevideo even
those distant from Judaism show up to
shul for that week and say Kaddish, and
many realize it’s not as threatening as they F thought — some of them continue to come 5. and say Kaddish for the whole year.

Then a funny thing happened. After davening, as we were looking at the large poster board highlighting pictures of the famous Israeli dignitaries and rabbis who had graced their community in recent years — people such as Rav Shlomo Amar and Rav Shmuel Eliyahu — a member of the “shivah” family, a frum guy from Brooklyn, recognized us from our Mishpacha

newspaper to come out of his father’s print shop

2. We’re still not convinced this structure is a classic mikveh, but the halachic discrepancies we found might just indicate it was actually built by anusim

3. Ari G. wasn’t breaking and entering, he was just trying to get into an old shul in the town of Colonia del Sacramento. In the end, nothing was left on the inside, but the outside of a shul will always be a dead giveaway

4. While Jews no longer live in the “centro,” there is a small vibrant Orthdox kehillah adjoining the Yavneh school, where we headed for Minchah and Maariv

5. The old Satmar shul once served a large chassidic community, but today the empty sanctuary doubles as a storage facility for a carpet business

6. The last offer Rabbi Ben Tzion Spitz, a successful mechanical engineer, expected was to be appointed the country’s chief rabbi

F4.

Offer of a Lifetime There are an estimated 20,000 Jews in Uruguay, less than 1 percent of the country’s 3.3 million people. It is a relatively open, secular, egalitarian country in which, one local Jew told us, “there may be anti-Semites, but there is no anti-Semitism.” Due to its historic stability, it’s been dubbed the “Switzerland of South America.” This of course made it an attractive destination for fleeing Jews at various periods of the 20th century. In the 1970s the number of Jews peaked at about 54,000, but aliyah, assimilation, and emigration to the US, Spain, Argentina, Panama, and Mexico due to local difficulties have resulted in a much reduced Jewish community.

Rabbi Spitz actually lives in Israel and travels every few weeks to Uruguay. In fact, he never intended to be a religious functionary, let alone chief rabbi of a South American country. He was born in New York, yet spent much of his childhood in South America, where his father worked as a commodities trader, and where he picked up fluency in Spanish and Portuguese. He then spent several years learning in Kerem B’Yavneh and Yeshiva University, and after making aliyah he learned at Yeshivat Har Etzion and received semichah from Pirchei Shoshanim.

But he never intended to go into the rabbinate — he has a master’s degree in mechanical engineering and worked for a number of years as a nuclear engineer for Raytheon, in his words, “on some of the biggest and coolest engineering projects one could imagine.” In Israel he managed several technology start-ups, and also made time to hone his other love — writing biblical fiction novels, several of which have been published.

In 2013, he received a surprise and life- changing offer. He was a learned rabbi who spoke English, Spanish, and Portuguese, and was thus offered to become chief rabbi of Uruguay, an opportunity that he couldn’t pass up — especially after having fallen in love with the country several years earlier while working on a team doing a site

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Meat and Memories in Uruguay

Printer-Friendly He reminisced about what a bustling, vibrant shul it had been, with shiurim and minyanim. But that was when he was young. The shul he took us into was locked and in disrepair. It was silent, empty, and dusty, and standing in the vacant main sanctuary, he told us about his family. He and his sister were both born in Uruguay and are the only descendants of their parents, who were both European born, his mother having arrived on those shores in 1931. They are both childless.

The shul, once full to the rafters but now deserted, had been his baby as he had kept it alive year after year, even having renovated it not long ago to maintain a minyan. But history had other plans, and the year we came was the first that no davening was held there on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. His sadness was almost palpable. He told us that because of the meat industry, Israeli rabbanim and shochtim have come to the community for many years. He bemoaned the fact that as the shul went into decline, they would “borrow” seforim from the beis medrash.

His father’s business was the most prominent of the three Jewish publishing houses. What truly demonstrated the vibrancy of the Jewish community in the 1940s and ’50s was that each of these publishers produced a daily Yiddish newspaper. Imagine enough interested people in Montevideo to support three daily Yiddish Jewish newspapers! Their paper was the religiously slanted daily Der Moment.

We asked him where the printing had been done and he said his dad had a print shop that his sister still runs as a business.

We got very excited because we have an interest in old-fashioned printing and we thought we might find something interesting and even historic. He asked us if we would like to go see it and we jumped at the opportunity.

He took us in and the first thing we noticed was the cluttered, dusty desk at the front of the store, with a cup holding miniature flags of Uruguay and Israel. While the shop is a bit more modern, he did take out the old Hebrew type for us to see. Each letter is reversed so when printed it reads the right way. Each letter was set by hand and once the entire page was set up, it was inked and printed. All the letters were then removed and returned to their boxes for the next page. In our era of laser printers in every house, it is hard to imagine the effort that went into printing not all that long ago. The Hebrew type was imported from Europe in the early part of the 20th century, the letters representing a world that no longer exists, and the technology too would soon be surpassed by modern printing.

For the Record The most valuable heirloom in the little shop was a collection of the bound volumes containing all those old newspapers. It is truly a historical treasure trove. What is clearly evidenced by the newspaper articles, pictures, and ads is a vibrant Torah-observant life. But the community never had the privilege of a yeshivah in its midst, and just like in other communities around the world, that is a recipe for ultimate extinction. Today the community is struggling to maintain itself, clearly a shell of what it once was.

Itche Margulies proudly flipped to the edition from May 14, 1948, and other significant days, informing us that he has the only complete set of this historical record. Concerned it may be lost, upon our return to Israel we checked in with the Israel National Library and although they indeed don’t have a hard copy, they actually have the entire thing on micro film.

Mr. Margulies then took us to see a smaller shul in the business district on Brecha Street, where frum Jews used to come in during the business day to learn and daven while in the thick of their commercial affairs.

He also mentioned the Satmar shul, which took us a bit by surprise. Satmar in Uruguay? Indeed, after the war some Satmar Jews found respite in Montevideo, but they have subsequently nearly all moved on to larger Jewish communities. Mr. Margulies said it was locked and there was no way to get in. We prevailed upon him to show it to us and trusted that a miracle would happen. We drove by and were amazed to see a young chassid walking out. We approached him asked to be let in: he was reluctant at first, but when he saw Margulies, his tune changed. It clearly had once been a beautiful shul, but today it is in a state of disrepair and is even used as a temporary storage facility.

Throughout our conversations with Itche Margulies, he repeatedly mentioned an almost mythical character in Uruguayan Jewish lore — someone named “Monsieur Chouchani.” We had never heard of him, but he seems to have been an awesome talmid chacham with a photographic memory. Much about him remains

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