Porto Alegre: The Southern Anchor

Most Jewish stories about Brazil get told in Rio or São Paulo. The southern one starts in a field. In 1904 thirty-seven families from Bessarabia stepped off a long passage and onto rough land near Santa Maria, in the cattle country of Rio Grande do Sul, to farm under a scheme dreamed up by a Belgian baron and run from Paris. The colony was called Philippson. The soil was better for grazing than for grain, and within a generation the farmers had mostly given up on the plough and gone to the city. The city was Porto Alegre, and the Jews who arrived already knew how to build something out of very little.

That is the shape of the southern community: it came in through agriculture and settled into a neighbourhood. By the 1910s and 1920s the immigrants had clustered in the Bom Fim, a district just north of the centre that took its name from a chapel and acquired, very quickly, a Yiddish accent. Synagogues, a school, delicatessens, an argument or two on the pavement of what is now Avenida Oswaldo Aranha. The colonists who had failed at wheat had not failed at the harder thing, which is making a place feel like home.

From the colonies to the city

The agricultural experiment was not a footnote; it was the door. The Jewish Colonization Association, founded by Baron Maurice de Hirsch in 1891 to resettle Jews fleeing the Russian Empire, bought a vast tract in the north of the state and opened a second colony, Quatro Irmãos, settled from 1911-1912. At its height it held around 450 families across four nuclei. It struggled with mismanagement and hard ground, and the JCA finally wound down its involvement in the early 1960s. But the people did not vanish with the project. They moved to Passo Fundo, to Erechim, and above all to Porto Alegre, carrying their Bessarabian Yiddish and their habit of organising into the capital.

What they organised was substantial. In 1915 Porto Alegre produced Di Mentshhayt, reckoned the first Jewish newspaper printed in Brazil. The Centro Israelita Porto-Alegrense dates to 1917. The Colégio Israelita Brasileiro, one of the oldest Jewish schools in the country, opened in 1922. When German Jews fleeing Hitler arrived in the 1930s, they founded SIBRA in 1936, the state's first Reform congregation, and the older Yiddish-speaking community made room. By 1961 the various bodies had a roof: the Federação Israelita do Rio Grande do Sul, which still speaks for the community today.

The southern anchor

Porto Alegre is now the third-largest Jewish community in Brazil, after São Paulo and Rio. The estimates run in the range of seven to nine thousand people, depending on who is counting and when, which is the honest way to put it: communities of this size are notoriously hard to measure, and the figure has drifted as families have moved or assimilated. What does not drift is the density of institution. A city does not produce a newspaper, a school, half a dozen congregations and a state federation by accident. It does so because the people meant to stay.

And there is a particular pleasure in the Bom Fim chapter, because it is so thoroughly local. This was not a community gazing back over its shoulder at Europe. It was a community that learned to argue in Portuguese, kept Yiddish for the kitchen and the joke, and produced in Moacyr Scliar a writer who could make the corner grocery of an immigrant district stand for the whole strange comedy of belonging. The south of Brazil turned out to be a good place to be a Jew, and an even better place to write about it.

What the Bom Fim keeps

The neighbourhood has changed, as neighbourhoods do; many families have moved to greener suburbs and the old district has thinned. But the synagogues on and around Oswaldo Aranha still open, the federation still meets, and the school still teaches. Scliar died in Porto Alegre in 2011, a member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters, having spent a career writing the Jewish south into the national literature. That is a particular kind of permanence. A community that produces its own chronicler has already decided it is worth recording.