When journalist Javier Sinay started investigating the murders of 22 Jewish immigrants over a century ago in Argentina, one question guided his reporting into a book: Why did his great-grandfather, who had founded the first Yiddish newspaper in Buenos Aires, write about the killings roughly 50 years later, in 1947?
“The article was mostly a memoir,” Sinay told NBC News about his great-grandfather's piece. “So I had many questions asking ‘why?' And one question led to another and then another, and it seemed to me that there was a good story here. But I didn’t know how long it would take me. I spent four years researching, traveling, looking in archives, interviewing people and writing.”
The murders occurred in a Jewish immigrant settlement named Moisés Ville, roughly 380 miles northwest of Buenos Aires. In his new book, released Tuesday, "The Murders of Moisés Ville: The Rise and Fall of the Jerusalem of South America," Sinay tells the story of this immigrant enclave. The book has drawn advanced praise, with Kirkus Reviews calling it a "worthy, unique entry in Jewish history."
At the turn of the 20th century, the Jewish immigrant community in Argentina was the second-largest in the Americas after New York City, according to historians.
Ilan Stavans, a Latin American and Latino culture professor at Amherst College, says Argentina holds a special place in history for many Jews, since it was one of three possible places, along with Jerusalem and Uganda, discussed for the creation of a Jewish state.
“Just like in the United States, with the descendants of Yiddish speakers who no longer speak Yiddish, there is a type of nostalgia and a desire in the children and grandchildren of Argentinean Jews to connect with their immigrant pasts and go beyond the myth,” Stavans said in an interview.
Sinay, a veteran crime reporter who has written for Rolling Stone magazine in Argentina, says that Moisés Ville was nicknamed the “Jerusalem of South America,” reaching its peak in the 1920s and 1930s.
Today, a tour of the town reveals many monuments to the community, including three synagogues, one of which has been declared a national landmark; the oldest Jewish cemetery in the country; two Jewish libraries; and a 400-seat theater that put on Yiddish plays.
One of the Moisés Ville victims included the father of Alberto Gerchunoff, a writer who was born in Russia and taught Jorge Luis Borges — Argentina’s most celebrated short story writer and one of Latin America's best-known literary figures.
Investigating the Moisés Ville murders, which occurred from 1889 to 1906, also involved digging into Sinay's family origins.
“My great-great-grandfather spent three years [there], and in 1897 led a rebellion of settlers in Moisés Ville against the administrator of the colony,” he said. “They rose up because the crops still did not yield enough and they had to pay for the land.”
Sinay said that a German Jewish financier and philanthropist, Baron Maurice de Hirsch, set up an organization, the Jewish Colonization Association, to sponsor the large-scale immigration of Russian Jews to Argentina in the late 1800s.
“The deal with the settlers was that they [the association] sold the land very cheaply, but the settlers had to pay for it over several years. And if the crops did not yield, they had nothing to pay with,” he said.
Sinay says his great-great-grandfather traveled from Moisés Ville to Paris on behalf of the settlers, to ask the association to remove the administrator. But the association refused and the rebellion was quashed, which ultimately drove the author’s family to resettle in other parts of Argentina.
“My great-great-grandfather tours the Jewish colonies to speak out against the administrators. And my great-grandfather, who was 20 years old, ends up in Buenos Aires, where he decides to start a newspaper in Yiddish," Sinay said. "It is a newspaper born with the spirit of denunciation to tell what was happening in Moisés Ville."
Who was the killer?
Sinay says that police reporting always poses the same question: Who was the killer? “Many of the Moisés Ville killings have to do with raids into the settlements” by Argentine cowboys, or gauchos, Sinai said.
In the case of the murders, there's a context that reflects Argentina’s immigration politics at the time. In the 19th century, Sinay said, the Argentine government wanted to create European immigrant settlements in the countryside. This political policy had repercussions for the nomadic gauchos and sparse Indigenous peoples of the region.
“These crimes are not motivated by antisemitism, but they do have a xenophobic component, because resentment is generated by the gaucho towards these new settlers, who are immigrants," Sinay said.
Consequently, while the gauchos are often held up as roaming literary heroes in Argentine literature, real life politics pitted them against European immigrants, including Jewish settlers, whom they saw as intruders favored by the government to drive them off their land.
“The nomads who did not want to settle and who did not accept to be employed and submit to the new economic model became outlaws and bandits,” Sinay said.
Despite the tension, Sinay says that gauchos and Jews ultimately forged new and sometimes unexpected identities — like that of the Jewish gaucho.
“What at first was a collision between two cultures, later came to a point where there was an understanding and cooperation that had to do with the gauchos working together with the settlers, and this in a broader sense has to do with the emergence of a new identity,” Sinay said.
Recalling a Jewish promised land in Argentina
Stavans, the professor, says that the path Sinay takes in his book — from investigating the 22 Moisés Ville murders to then studying Yiddish as the descendant of Jewish immigrants — is similar to the experiences of the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of many Yiddish-speaking immigrants who migrated to New York around the same time.
Like Sinay, Stavans is Jewish, but his family settled in Mexico. He explains that the descendants of many immigrants in general, and Jews in particular, have a genealogical desire to discover where they come from and what they had to sacrifice along the way.
The professor is an expert on Jewish migration to the Americas. He has recently written about a Nazi German colony in Chile used by the dictator Augusto Pinochet as an extermination camp for political prisoners. He compares the experiences of Jews in Moisés Ville attending Yiddish plays with those of Jews in New York filming the first Yiddish movies.
“Imagine Eastern European Jews arriving to certain parts of Long Island, which they did, and buying land and living there in shtetls before moving to the city,” Stavans said, referring to both settlements as flourishing hubs of Jewish immigrant culture. “The first Yiddish movies that were filmed in the U.S. were filmed in these properties in Long Island.”
Sinay is scheduled to do a book tour in the U.S. from April 3 to 12. Visits include the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York and the Harvard Co-op in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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