DEVELOPMENT-LATAM: Jews and the Myth of Prosperity

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Aug 3 2000 (IPS) - Jewish families living in ramshackle houses in the slums, their elderly and children travelling two hours by bus to reach free kitchens, and young adults desperately searching for work are true-to-life conditions that belie the myth of this community’s wealth in Latin America.

The social deterioration of the region’s middle class, and Jews in particular, was the focus of a recent forum organised by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and the Latin American Jewish Congress, held in Montevideo.

The conference formed part of a series of IDB meetings to study assistance programmes for the region’s poorest people, which began by bringing together leaders from the Roman Catholic community and will continue with representatives of the various Protestant religions.

“For the IDB it is a stimulus in the fight against poverty to have quality allies in the Jewish communities of Latin America because they are proven leaders in the areas of solidarity and volunteering,” said the bank’s president, Enrique Iglesias, at the July meeting Uruguay.

The president of the Human Development Commission of the Latin American Jewish Congress, Bernardo Kliksberg, told IPS that the meeting served to abolish two myths: that the Jewish community is rich and that its members are individualistic and express little solidarity.

“There is no place here for golden myths. The Latin American social crisis cuts through the entire Jewish community and creates silent anxiety for families struggling to survive – something that can be confronted by the institutions of this community,” Kliksberg explained.

Approximately 450,000 Jews live in Latin America, and 80 percent are considered middle class. The largest Jewish community in the region is in Argentina, followed by Sao Paulo.

But over the last decade the middle band of the Latin American population suffered a downturn that demographers call “new poverty.” They are people considered middle-class because of their level of education, but poor when it comes to income.

Because it was deeply rooted within that group, the Jewish community was also caught in the economic fall.

The new Jewish poverty is significant and included families who dropped well below the limits of economic subsistence, said Kliksberg, author of the book “The Fight against Poverty in Latin America: The Deterioration of the Middle Class and the Experience of Jewish Communities.”

His study covers this economic deterioration and explains how the collapse affected the Jewish communities in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Uruguay and Venezuela.

It also outlines the broad range of social assistance programmes co-ordinated by the same community. This type of solidarity is evident in Argentina, for example, where 60 percent of the 20,000 children enrolled in Jewish schools are on scholarships and 10 percent are provided with free meals.

Manuel Tenembaum, director of the Jewish Latin American Council, explained at the forum in Montevideo that the life of Jews in the region can be summed up as a two-pronged movement – that is “not exempt of tensions” – in which they seek equality with the majority population at the same time they defend their rights to maintain their group identity.

This defence of their “difference” led many Jewish institutions to re-work their approach to helping the poorest families in order to prevent the social-economic situation from isolating the community.

But Jewish leaders stressed that, in their tradition, anonymous assistance for those most in need has always been a moral obligation, and understood as an act of justice that does not seek compensation, and is not an act of charity.

This philosophy, in relation to the current difficult social- economic situation, convinced many of the region’s Jewish organisations to re-think their goals.

“For the Jewish people, poverty is not an inevitable ill, but is a problem that arises from the development of societies and that must by eradicated by biblical mandate,” stressed Kliksberg, who also serves as director of the IDB Inter-American Institute of Social Development.

In Venezuela, the middle class shrunk from 21 to 13 percent of the total population over the last 10 years, and the Jewish community was found within that sector. To confront the most extreme cases of poverty, it created a clinic and a pharmacy to attend to community members free of charge.

Meanwhile, in Argentina, the Solidarity Alliance appeared, a network of social assistance institutions for impoverished Jews. Fifty of the community’s aid organisations joined to form the Tzedaka (‘help one another’ in Hebrew).

One of the Tzedaka organisations is the Israeli-Argentinean Mutual Association (AMIA), which won a bloody fame in 1994 after a car-bomb levelled its offices, killing 86 people.

Many Argentineans did not know until the bombing, which was never resolved, that the AMIA was an assistance institution.

The AMIA provides social services, including an employment programme – which averaged 500 requests per month from young people -, housing subsidies, in-home assistance for the elderly and free cafeterias. It also has a strong organisation for volunteers.

Social workers say the number of impoverished Jewish families in Argentina is “unprecedented,” and point out that this sector is characterised by its attempts to hide the problem until it reaches crisis proportions, making it much more difficult to provide adequate, timely assistance.

“The pride of having belonged to a social sector that did not know economic shortages constitutes a cultural barrier that is difficult to overcome in asking for social assistance,” says Ariel Rofman in his study titled “Structural Unemployment in Argentina and Its Impact on the Jewish Community in Buenos Aires.”

Sao Paulo is another major Latin American city where the myth of Jewish wealth persists. But Jewish families there can also be found living in the slums, known in Portuguese as ‘favelas.’

There are 75,000 Jews living in this city of 17 million and, though the majority are considered middle class, the portion of the community living in poverty is increasing.

According to a study by the Israeli Federation of Sao Paulo for the book edited by Kliksberg, there are more than 50 Jewish organisations providing assistance to the people most in need – Jews and non-Jews – and are staffed by Jewish professionals who volunteer their time.

In Chile, Elimát Jason, of the Jewish Communities’ Representative Committee, also stressed the great number of Jewish social programmes that target the increasing number of its community members who are poor, or even indigent.

In Mexico, meanwhile, a study by the Central Committee of the Jewish Community shows that 93 percent of the country’s Jewish families are involved in retail, industry or professional fields, which are all sectors that have been hurt by the sharp currency devaluations and inflationary spikes.

“Requests for economic help, medical assistance and scholarships have grown disproportionately since 1995,” says the Mexican report. “As an example, applications for scholarships in Jewish schools jumped more than 50 percent.”

The same study indicates that five percent of Jewish-Mexican families live in extreme poverty, another 13 percent receive food assistance and 24 percent rely on school scholarships for their children. It also stresses that past beneficiaries of assistance tended to be the elderly, while the recipients today are mostly children.

Kliksberg believes these studies will give greater visibility to the phenomenon of Jewish poverty in the region, and will help to undo the myth of this community’s prosperity and to highlight the other side of this prejudice: a long tradition of solidarity that is now being strengthened.