UW students help link Madison and Córdoba Jewish communities
It is balmy spring now in Argentina; yet Elaine Cohen had a recent experience there that she described as “chilling.”
Cohen (no relation to this writer) comes from the Cleveland area, and she is a senior majoring in sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. On Nov. 22-30, she and seven other UW students, led by theater and Jewish studies Prof. Robert Skloot, traveled to Córdoba, Argentina’s second largest city, to visit the Jewish community there.
To Cohen, who also teaches Sunday school at Madison’s Beth Israel Center (a Conservative synagogue), “the most amazing part of the trip for me” was attending Shabbat services at Córdoba’s Conservative synagogue.
“To be sitting in that synagogue, though I didn’t quite understand all the Spanish, but hearing the Hebrew prayers and the congregation singing the same tunes I do at synagogue at home was chilling,” Cohen told The Chronicle.
In fact, she turned to Silvana Garbarsky, the mother of the family she stayed with, and said to her, “This is amazing; you sing all the same tunes we do.” And Garbarsky replied, “Yes; we’re all Jews.”
Three other students in the group that The Chronicle was able to interview also said they had “amazing” experiences and “eye-opening” moments during the visit.
To sophomore Sarah Michels, a Milwaukee native whose mother is from Mexico City, the highlight was the warmth and friendliness of the Córdoba Jews. “Some of the nicest people I ever met live there,” she said.
Moreover, “They were so thrilled that we were there,” said Michels. “People talk about how everybody abroad hates Americans today; but that’s not the case in Argentina at all. We said we were Americans and people were, like, at our feet.”
Chicagoan Jonathan Mannheim, a pre-med sophomore and pro-Israel activist, also enjoyed the personal contacts. He said his favorite moment of the trip was coming back from visiting one of the city’s three synagogues and then “hanging out” in an area shopping mall with the kids of his host family and “all their family friends…. It was so much fun.”
But it wasn’t all fun; the visitors also had the chance to see some of Argentina’s problems.
Eyal Halamish is a U.S.-born son of Israelis and a sophomore “wildlife ecology in transition to political science” major. He recalled a visit to a Córdoba shantytown to watch poor children being fed by a Jewish community-sponsored mobile meals program called La Botellita (literally, the little bottle).
“You saw people living in boxes, surrounded by trash,” Halamish said. “It opened up a lot of our eyes to see how tragic life is in a lot of countries.”
Hope to return
For more than a year, Madison Jews affiliated with Beth Israel Center have been talking about developing a relationship with the Jewish community of Córdoba, which numbers about 9,000 in an overall city population of 1.3 million.
Skloot, a Beth Israel Center member, has been the impetus and go-between. He first heard of the Córdoba community during a visit to Chile in 1995, when he met a rabbi who came from there. He raised the idea of his synagogue “twinning” with that community in early 2003 and visited the city himself for the first time in March of that year.
Skloot told The Chronicle that the synagogue and the Córdoba community have had some small-scale contacts since then, such as exchange of e-mail letters between children at the BIC religious school and Córdoba’s Jewish day school.
Then earlier this year, said Skloot, two Jewish UW alumni made a donation to the university’s George L. Mosse/Laurence A. Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies. The donors wanted this money to be used “to create programs for Jewish studies students off campus that involved faculty and students.”
“Since those were the only requirements,” said Skloot, “I went about creating a project like this [having students visit Córdoba] to allow us to have an exciting Jewish venture.”
“My intent,” he continued, “was to create a project to bring two diaspora communities together and allow each of them to experience something about the people in a mutual exchange.”
Moreover, BIC was linked to this venture through Skloot by “allowing me to be an emissary to make contact between their religious school and ours” and by synagogue members “contributing funds for purchasing a gift for the school in Córdoba,” Skloot said.
The trip was open to any student involved with Jewish studies; and Skloot and the Center for Jewish Studies administrator, Anita Lightfoot, chose the eight who would go.
The itinerary in Córdoba was planned with help of Alberto Guzman, executive director of the city’s Jewish day school and a graduate of UW-Madison. All the participants stayed with Córdoba Jewish families.
Skloot said he was “astonished and delighted that the trip was so successful. I came to see how important it was for our community in Madison to spend time with the people of Córdoba. And I believe they felt that their community was being acknowledged and recognized for the high quality of its social organization and Jewish life.”
Skloot said he would like to begin planning another trip similar to this one to maintain contact between the communities. However, he can’t foresee this happening sooner than about a year from now, especially as he is scheduled to teach in the Netherlands this spring.
But some of the students said they intend to go back on their own. In fact, Elaine Cohen said, “I’m already planning my trip back there.”
