Moisés Ville
Encyclopedia
Moisés Ville is a small town (comuna) in the province
of Santa Fe
, Argentina
founded in 23 October 1889 by Eastern Europe
an and Russian Jews escaping pogrom
s and persecution. The original name intended for the town was Kiryat Moshe ("Town of Moses" in Hebrew
) honoring Baron Maurice Moshe Hirsch
, but the land agent who registered the settlement translated it to the French
-like Moïsesville which was later hispanized to the current Moisés Ville. The town is located about 177 km (110 mi) from the provincial capital, in the San Cristóbal Department
and 616 km (383 mi) from Buenos Aires
. It has 2,572 inhabitants as of the .
from Kamenetz-Podolsk, Ukraine
. Moises Ville is regarded as the first agricultural Jewish colony in South America
, beating by some months a smaller group coming from Bessarabia
who established a neighbouring settlement called Monigotes. These 130 families (815 persons) "Colonos" are the Argentine Jewry equivalent to the Mayflower
passengers, and whoever can prove his descent from them can claim to be part of the Agricultural Pioneer Aristocracy.
It all started one day in 1887 when leaders of Jewish communities in Podolia
and Bessarabia
met in Katowice
(Silesia
, Poland
) to seek a solution to their problems. They decided that emigration to Palestine
was the solution and chose a delegate, Eliezer Hauffmann, to travel to Paris
and meet there the famous Jewish Philanthropist, Baron Edmond James de Rothschild
asking for his support.
Two theories exist on what happened next: Some say the negotiations with the Baron failed while others believe Kauffman wasn't able to meet him. Afraid of going back empty-handed and learning that there was an official bureau of information of the Argentine Republic, Kauffman decided to meet J. B. Frank, the officer in charge, and learned that a gentleman named Rafael Hernández was interested in selling lands to European immigrants. The land was in Nueva Plata, Province of Buenos Aires, near the city of La Plata
. A contract was signed there and then and thus the 820 people represented by Kauffman, comprising 130 families (a number equivalent to half the Jewish population of Argentina at that time) began their trip to Argentina on board of the SS Weser
.
They arrived at Buenos Aires
on August 14, 1889 and learned right away that the lands they had acquired were not available. Since their agreement the price of the land had more than doubled, making it "inconvenient" for unscrupulous Hernández to fulfill the contract. Rabbi Henry Joseph, the leader of Argentine Jewry, tried to save the day and arranged for the newcomers to meet Pedro Palacios, the Jewish Community attorney, who happened to be the owner of vast lands in the Province of Santa Fe, right where the new railway line to Tucumán was being built. Palacios agreed to sell the WESER passengers some land he owned. By late August contracts were signed and the immigrants were on their way. To their dismay the travel was bad and the place they arrived to even worse. The families were lodged in freight cars parked in a shed along the railway line. They expected to be transferred to their fields, get farm animals and agricultural appliances and materials (as established in the contract) but none of these happened. Railway workers distributed food among the hungry children but soon enough a typhus epidemic exacerbated by poor hygiene, took the lives of 64 of them. In a very short time two cemeteries were built, one in Palacios and the other in Monigotes. Those cemeteries in the surroundings of Moises Ville founded the base of the Jewish community and bonded the Jewish immigrants to the land: they made the families stay and not leave the resting place of the deceased unattended.
Meantime, the national authorities, learning of the immigrants' deplorable conditions, ordered an investigation by the General Immigration Commissioner. Luckily for the newcomers, Wilhelm Loewenthal, a Rumanian doctor from the University of Berlin, specializing in bacteriology
, who had been hired in Paris by the Argentine government for a scientific mission and also asked by the A.I.U. to keep an eye on the Weser immigrants, traveled to Palacios Train Station where he was astonished by the miserable living conditions of the immigrants. In spite of their ordeal and difficulties the settlers still hoped to become farmers. He reported to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Estanislao Zeballos and simultaneously met Palacios requesting him to comply with his obligations. Back in Paris, Loewenthal submitted a written project to Rabbi Zadoc Kahn for the agricultural colonization of Jewish families in Argentina by means of establishing a Colonizing Association and allocating to each family a farm of 50 to 100 hectares, at the cost of US$ 2000 per family. If it had not been for the travelers abandoned in Palacios Station it is unlikely that Baron Hirsch would have thought of sending more Jews to Argentina, or created the JCA. But as a result of the ordeal the 1891 Baron Hirsch Plan was born.
Within the frame of the JCA's program a further group of 42 families from the Province of Grodno arrived to Moises Ville between 1894 and 1895. The colonists settled in villages near Moises Ville, named after the number of houses that formed them: "The Four Houses", "The Six Houses", "The Twelve Houses" and "The Twenty-four houses". In 1900, the colonists requested the JCA to enlarge the colony and bring new groups from the Grodno area. The request was conveyed through the colonist Noe Cociovich who, in 1900, 1901 and 1902, carried out several trips to Russia and assembled three groups totaling 104 families that met the JCA demands: they already had relatives in the colony and they paid for their tickets themselves. The groups settled in the Wavelberg area, north of Moises Ville, which had been named for the philanthropist who helped finance the travel; in the Virginia area to the east, and in La Juanita to the west. In 1901, another group of 31 families organized in Bialystok
(current Poland) arrived, led by the writer and Jewish leader Gdalia Bublik. The area in which this group settled is known as Línea Bialystok (Bialystok Line). Many of the colonists who settled in La Juanita and Bialystok later moved to the town of Las Palmeras. At the same time, a group of Rumanian families selected by the JCA arrived. This group settled in the area of Zadok Kahn, to the west of Moises Ville. It was named in honor of the above mentioned Chief Rabbi of Paris. Most of the colonists in that group that remained also eventually moved to Las Palmeras. Dr. Guillermo Lowenthal heard that plans were made to move the settlement to two new locations in the Province of Entre Rios. The Moises Villenses refused: they did not want to leave the place were they were already building a third cemetery to bury the first victim of an attack by gauchos. At the meeting in the synagogue, they decided to stay and bring to Moises Ville the children they had buried in Monigotes and Palacios.
In 1903, soon after the Kishinev pogrom, an additional group from Bessarabia was organized. This group settled in the Mutchnik area, northwest of Moises Ville, at Línea Ortiz (Ortiz Line). And in 1905 a group from Kherson Governorate, Ukraine
colonized the area of Monigotes. Several years later the zone of Capivara, to the northeast of Moises Ville, was colonized, In the decade of the 1930s German Jews persecuted by the Nazis began to arrive, in a wave that lasted until the beginning of World War II. After the war was over, several families of Dutch and German refugees arrived, most of them sent by the JCA.
Colonists of the first group and some from the second settled in the surrounding areas of a budding urban center. As Noe Cociovich related, that center had three shaky buildings in 1894: the synagogue, the JCA administration house and the public baths. The colonists' houses were arranged around them along three streets. The plots were 100 meters wide and 1,000 meters deep. Moisés Ville became the canonical town of the Gauchos Judíos
("Jewish Gaucho
s") who worked the land in Argentina in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Upward social mobility caused the town to lose population steadily as the younger generations moved to the big cities of Rosario
and Buenos Aires
in search of education and opportunity.
Moisés Ville, together with its sister colonies of Mauricio and Clara, were the main examples of the work of Baron Maurice de Hirsch's Jewish Colonization Association
.
The Communal President of Moisés Ville as of 2005 is Omar Delio Delbino, of the Socialist Party
.
Provinces of Argentina
Argentina is subdivided into twenty-three provinces and one autonomous city...
of Santa Fe
Santa Fe Province
The Invincible Province of Santa Fe, in Spanish Provincia Invencible de Santa Fe , is a province of Argentina, located in the center-east of the country. Neighboring provinces are from the north clockwise Chaco , Corrientes, Entre Ríos, Buenos Aires, Córdoba, and Santiago del Estero...
, Argentina
Argentina
Argentina , officially the Argentine Republic , is the second largest country in South America by land area, after Brazil. It is constituted as a federation of 23 provinces and an autonomous city, Buenos Aires...
founded in 23 October 1889 by Eastern Europe
Eastern Europe
Eastern Europe is the eastern part of Europe. The term has widely disparate geopolitical, geographical, cultural and socioeconomic readings, which makes it highly context-dependent and even volatile, and there are "almost as many definitions of Eastern Europe as there are scholars of the region"...
an and Russian Jews escaping pogrom
Pogrom
A pogrom is a form of violent riot, a mob attack directed against a minority group, and characterized by killings and destruction of their homes and properties, businesses, and religious centres...
s and persecution. The original name intended for the town was Kiryat Moshe ("Town of Moses" in Hebrew
Hebrew language
Hebrew is a Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family. Culturally, is it considered by Jews and other religious groups as the language of the Jewish people, though other Jewish languages had originated among diaspora Jews, and the Hebrew language is also used by non-Jewish groups, such...
) honoring Baron Maurice Moshe Hirsch
Maurice de Hirsch
Maurice de Hirsch was a German-Jewish philanthropist who set up charitable foundations to promote Jewish education and improve the lot of oppressed European Jewry. He was the founder of the Jewish Colonization Association which sponsored large-scale Jewish immigration to Argentina...
, but the land agent who registered the settlement translated it to the French
French language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
-like Moïsesville which was later hispanized to the current Moisés Ville. The town is located about 177 km (110 mi) from the provincial capital, in the San Cristóbal Department
San Cristóbal Department
The San Cristóbal Department is an administrative subdivision of the province of Santa Fe, Argentina...
and 616 km (383 mi) from Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires is the capital and largest city of Argentina, and the second-largest metropolitan area in South America, after São Paulo. It is located on the western shore of the estuary of the Río de la Plata, on the southeastern coast of the South American continent...
. It has 2,572 inhabitants as of the .
History
Moises Ville was founded by a group of Russian Jewish colonists who arrived in August 1889 aboard the SS WeserSS Weser (1867)
SS Weser was an ocean liner owned by North German Lloyd. The ship was built by Caird & Company of Greenock, Scotland, in 1867 and served the Bremen-Southampton-New York-Baltimore line from June 1, 1867 until June 13, 1895 when she was transferred to the Bremen-South America service for two...
from Kamenetz-Podolsk, Ukraine
Ukraine
Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It has an area of 603,628 km², making it the second largest contiguous country on the European continent, after Russia...
. Moises Ville is regarded as the first agricultural Jewish colony in South America
South America
South America is a continent situated in the Western Hemisphere, mostly in the Southern Hemisphere, with a relatively small portion in the Northern Hemisphere. The continent is also considered a subcontinent of the Americas. It is bordered on the west by the Pacific Ocean and on the north and east...
, beating by some months a smaller group coming from Bessarabia
Bessarabia
Bessarabia is a historical term for the geographic region in Eastern Europe bounded by the Dniester River on the east and the Prut River on the west....
who established a neighbouring settlement called Monigotes. These 130 families (815 persons) "Colonos" are the Argentine Jewry equivalent to the Mayflower
Mayflower
The Mayflower was the ship that transported the English Separatists, better known as the Pilgrims, from a site near the Mayflower Steps in Plymouth, England, to Plymouth, Massachusetts, , in 1620...
passengers, and whoever can prove his descent from them can claim to be part of the Agricultural Pioneer Aristocracy.
It all started one day in 1887 when leaders of Jewish communities in Podolia
Podolia
The region of Podolia is an historical region in the west-central and south-west portions of present-day Ukraine, corresponding to Khmelnytskyi Oblast and Vinnytsia Oblast. Northern Transnistria, in Moldova, is also a part of Podolia...
and Bessarabia
Bessarabia
Bessarabia is a historical term for the geographic region in Eastern Europe bounded by the Dniester River on the east and the Prut River on the west....
met in Katowice
Katowice
Katowice is a city in Silesia in southern Poland, on the Kłodnica and Rawa rivers . Katowice is located in the Silesian Highlands, about north of the Silesian Beskids and about southeast of the Sudetes Mountains.It is the central district of the Upper Silesian Metropolis, with a population of 2...
(Silesia
Silesia
Silesia is a historical region of Central Europe located mostly in Poland, with smaller parts also in the Czech Republic, and Germany.Silesia is rich in mineral and natural resources, and includes several important industrial areas. Silesia's largest city and historical capital is Wrocław...
, Poland
Poland
Poland , officially the Republic of Poland , is a country in Central Europe bordered by Germany to the west; the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south; Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania to the east; and the Baltic Sea and Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian exclave, to the north...
) to seek a solution to their problems. They decided that emigration to Palestine
Palestine
Palestine is a conventional name, among others, used to describe the geographic region between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, and various adjoining lands....
was the solution and chose a delegate, Eliezer Hauffmann, to travel to Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
and meet there the famous Jewish Philanthropist, Baron Edmond James de Rothschild
Edmond James de Rothschild
Baron Edmond Benjamin James de Rothschild was a French member of the Rothschild banking family. A strong supporter of Zionism, his generous donations lent significant support to the movement during its early years, which helped lead to the establishment of the State of Israel.- Early years :A...
asking for his support.
Two theories exist on what happened next: Some say the negotiations with the Baron failed while others believe Kauffman wasn't able to meet him. Afraid of going back empty-handed and learning that there was an official bureau of information of the Argentine Republic, Kauffman decided to meet J. B. Frank, the officer in charge, and learned that a gentleman named Rafael Hernández was interested in selling lands to European immigrants. The land was in Nueva Plata, Province of Buenos Aires, near the city of La Plata
La Plata
La Plata is the capital city of the Province of Buenos Aires, Argentina, and of La Plata partido. According to the , the city proper has a population of 574,369 and its metropolitan area has 694,253 inhabitants....
. A contract was signed there and then and thus the 820 people represented by Kauffman, comprising 130 families (a number equivalent to half the Jewish population of Argentina at that time) began their trip to Argentina on board of the SS Weser
SS Weser (1867)
SS Weser was an ocean liner owned by North German Lloyd. The ship was built by Caird & Company of Greenock, Scotland, in 1867 and served the Bremen-Southampton-New York-Baltimore line from June 1, 1867 until June 13, 1895 when she was transferred to the Bremen-South America service for two...
.
They arrived at Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires is the capital and largest city of Argentina, and the second-largest metropolitan area in South America, after São Paulo. It is located on the western shore of the estuary of the Río de la Plata, on the southeastern coast of the South American continent...
on August 14, 1889 and learned right away that the lands they had acquired were not available. Since their agreement the price of the land had more than doubled, making it "inconvenient" for unscrupulous Hernández to fulfill the contract. Rabbi Henry Joseph, the leader of Argentine Jewry, tried to save the day and arranged for the newcomers to meet Pedro Palacios, the Jewish Community attorney, who happened to be the owner of vast lands in the Province of Santa Fe, right where the new railway line to Tucumán was being built. Palacios agreed to sell the WESER passengers some land he owned. By late August contracts were signed and the immigrants were on their way. To their dismay the travel was bad and the place they arrived to even worse. The families were lodged in freight cars parked in a shed along the railway line. They expected to be transferred to their fields, get farm animals and agricultural appliances and materials (as established in the contract) but none of these happened. Railway workers distributed food among the hungry children but soon enough a typhus epidemic exacerbated by poor hygiene, took the lives of 64 of them. In a very short time two cemeteries were built, one in Palacios and the other in Monigotes. Those cemeteries in the surroundings of Moises Ville founded the base of the Jewish community and bonded the Jewish immigrants to the land: they made the families stay and not leave the resting place of the deceased unattended.
Meantime, the national authorities, learning of the immigrants' deplorable conditions, ordered an investigation by the General Immigration Commissioner. Luckily for the newcomers, Wilhelm Loewenthal, a Rumanian doctor from the University of Berlin, specializing in bacteriology
Bacteriology
Bacteriology is the study of bacteria. This subdivision of microbiology involves the identification, classification, and characterization of bacterial species...
, who had been hired in Paris by the Argentine government for a scientific mission and also asked by the A.I.U. to keep an eye on the Weser immigrants, traveled to Palacios Train Station where he was astonished by the miserable living conditions of the immigrants. In spite of their ordeal and difficulties the settlers still hoped to become farmers. He reported to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Estanislao Zeballos and simultaneously met Palacios requesting him to comply with his obligations. Back in Paris, Loewenthal submitted a written project to Rabbi Zadoc Kahn for the agricultural colonization of Jewish families in Argentina by means of establishing a Colonizing Association and allocating to each family a farm of 50 to 100 hectares, at the cost of US$ 2000 per family. If it had not been for the travelers abandoned in Palacios Station it is unlikely that Baron Hirsch would have thought of sending more Jews to Argentina, or created the JCA. But as a result of the ordeal the 1891 Baron Hirsch Plan was born.
Within the frame of the JCA's program a further group of 42 families from the Province of Grodno arrived to Moises Ville between 1894 and 1895. The colonists settled in villages near Moises Ville, named after the number of houses that formed them: "The Four Houses", "The Six Houses", "The Twelve Houses" and "The Twenty-four houses". In 1900, the colonists requested the JCA to enlarge the colony and bring new groups from the Grodno area. The request was conveyed through the colonist Noe Cociovich who, in 1900, 1901 and 1902, carried out several trips to Russia and assembled three groups totaling 104 families that met the JCA demands: they already had relatives in the colony and they paid for their tickets themselves. The groups settled in the Wavelberg area, north of Moises Ville, which had been named for the philanthropist who helped finance the travel; in the Virginia area to the east, and in La Juanita to the west. In 1901, another group of 31 families organized in Bialystok
Bialystok
Białystok is the largest city in northeastern Poland and the capital of the Podlaskie Voivodeship. Located on the Podlaskie Plain on the banks of the Biała River, Białystok ranks second in terms of population density, eleventh in population, and thirteenth in area, of the cities of Poland...
(current Poland) arrived, led by the writer and Jewish leader Gdalia Bublik. The area in which this group settled is known as Línea Bialystok (Bialystok Line). Many of the colonists who settled in La Juanita and Bialystok later moved to the town of Las Palmeras. At the same time, a group of Rumanian families selected by the JCA arrived. This group settled in the area of Zadok Kahn, to the west of Moises Ville. It was named in honor of the above mentioned Chief Rabbi of Paris. Most of the colonists in that group that remained also eventually moved to Las Palmeras. Dr. Guillermo Lowenthal heard that plans were made to move the settlement to two new locations in the Province of Entre Rios. The Moises Villenses refused: they did not want to leave the place were they were already building a third cemetery to bury the first victim of an attack by gauchos. At the meeting in the synagogue, they decided to stay and bring to Moises Ville the children they had buried in Monigotes and Palacios.
In 1903, soon after the Kishinev pogrom, an additional group from Bessarabia was organized. This group settled in the Mutchnik area, northwest of Moises Ville, at Línea Ortiz (Ortiz Line). And in 1905 a group from Kherson Governorate, Ukraine
Jewish agricultural colonies in the Russian Empire
Jewish agricultural colonies in the Russian Empire were first established in Kherson Governorate in 1806. The Ukase of December 9, 1804 allowed Jews for the first time in Russia to purchase land for farming settlements . Jews were provided exemption from military service, tax abatements, and...
colonized the area of Monigotes. Several years later the zone of Capivara, to the northeast of Moises Ville, was colonized, In the decade of the 1930s German Jews persecuted by the Nazis began to arrive, in a wave that lasted until the beginning of World War II. After the war was over, several families of Dutch and German refugees arrived, most of them sent by the JCA.
Colonists of the first group and some from the second settled in the surrounding areas of a budding urban center. As Noe Cociovich related, that center had three shaky buildings in 1894: the synagogue, the JCA administration house and the public baths. The colonists' houses were arranged around them along three streets. The plots were 100 meters wide and 1,000 meters deep. Moisés Ville became the canonical town of the Gauchos Judíos
Jewish gauchos
Jewish gauchos were Jewish immigrants who settled in fertile regions of Argentina in agricultural colonies established by the Jewish Colonization Association....
("Jewish Gaucho
Gaucho
Gaucho is a term commonly used to describe residents of the South American pampas, chacos, or Patagonian grasslands, found principally in parts of Argentina, Uruguay, Southern Chile, and Southern Brazil...
s") who worked the land in Argentina in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Upward social mobility caused the town to lose population steadily as the younger generations moved to the big cities of Rosario
Rosario
Rosario is the largest city in the province of Santa Fe, Argentina. It is located northwest of Buenos Aires, on the western shore of the Paraná River and has 1,159,004 residents as of the ....
and Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires is the capital and largest city of Argentina, and the second-largest metropolitan area in South America, after São Paulo. It is located on the western shore of the estuary of the Río de la Plata, on the southeastern coast of the South American continent...
in search of education and opportunity.
Moisés Ville, together with its sister colonies of Mauricio and Clara, were the main examples of the work of Baron Maurice de Hirsch's Jewish Colonization Association
Jewish Colonization Association
The Jewish Colonization Association was created on September 11, 1891 by the Baron Maurice de Hirsch. Its aim was to facilitate the mass emigration of Jews from Russia and other Eastern European countries, by settling them in agricultural colonies on lands purchased by the committee, particularly...
.
The Communal President of Moisés Ville as of 2005 is Omar Delio Delbino, of the Socialist Party
Socialist Party (Argentina)
The Socialist Party is a social-democratic political party in Argentina. The history of socialism in Argentina began in the 1890s, when a group of people, notably Juan B. Justo, expressed the need for a greater social focus....
.
External links
Moisés Ville - Semi-official website. Museo Moisés Ville - Museum Official website. Jewish Encyclopedia - Agricultural colonies in the Argentine Republic.- JBuff.com - The Argentina Jewish Community.
- O'Mara, Richard, "Palestine on the Pampas", Virginia Quarterly Review, Winter 2001
- The Website on Moises Ville Genealogy and Ancestry by Mario Heifetz
- A Webpage on Moises Ville in the Barg Family Web Site