Looking South
Marshall Meyer (1930-1993), the charismatic Conservative rabbi who was instrumental in revitalizing Jewish life in Argentina, studied with Abraham Joshua Heschel at the Jewish Theological Seminary. Like his rebbe, Rabbi Meyer was an ardent believer in the vital importance of the fight for social justice. He was an influential leader in the struggle against the Argentine junta in the 1970s and 80s and was very active in the effort to free Jacobo Timerman from prison there. Rabbi Meyer and his wife, Naomi, returned to the United States in 1984, after the junta was out of power, leaving Conservative Judaism flourishing in Argentina.
We were met at the dock in Buenos Aires by a few members of the board of directors of the venerable Libertad Synagogue (Congregacion Israelita de la República Argentina), the synagogue that had contracted my husband, Rabbi Marshall Meyer. A man waved his finger in my face and said, “Unicamente castellano.” He was telling me that I was to speak only Spanish.
I couldn’t speak any Spanish at all.
We were there so Marshall could begin a two-year stint at the synagogue. We had found ourselves at loose ends. Both of his parents had died recently, he’d just finished the coursework for a PhD, and I had just graduated from the joint program at Barnard College and the Jewish Theological Seminary and was stuck in an unsatisfactory Madison Avenue job. We wanted out for a few years. He’d sent out feelers looking for a job; this was the place we heard from first. And so, in 1959, there we were in Buenos Aires.
That night, we were expected at our first board meeting. The women, all dressed in black, wearing pearls, had been invited especially for the occasion; there were no women on the board. And there I stood, in my transparent plastic high heels and red coat. The shock probably was mutual.
After the meeting, which had started at about 9 pm, Marshall, who loved opera, insisted on seeing the Colón, the opera house where Toscanini had made his debut. A young man who spoke very little English volunteered to accompany us. We sneaked up to the highest balcony and stood there in wonder until the end of the last act. Later we pumped our guide for information about the synagogue, the country, the people, and the politics. This was our first day in Argentina.
The city was magnificently laid out but it had only one traffic light, and the Argentines’ approach to driving was hit or miss. “How do you get to the other side of the Avenida 9 de Julio?” asks the Argentine. “I was born there.” At night, the streets were dimly lit and the stores dark. It was hard to get used to the ubiquitous construction workers barbecuing on the streets and their constant flirtatious comments to women walking by.
A few weeks after our arrival, Marshall wrote to the senior rabbi and the board about the synagogue services, which he felt were too long and drawn out. “The worshipers pay little attention and do not participate; there isn’t a uniform prayer book; there is very little warmth; it is too rigid, formal and not very interesting.” He went on to present his idea of an authentic Jewish service: “We must create a service that is attractive spiritually, esthetically and intellectually; a service that provokes the participation of the worshippers and that helps us feel the nearness of God’s presence; a service that will inculcate an intense love for Judaism and a desire to study its teachings.”
That same month he wrote a letter to the chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary, Dr. Louis Finkelstein. “One of the basic problems is that the congregation has not defined who they are and what they want to be. For example, an organ is used during the services, but there is separate seating for men and women and there are no prayers in Spanish, even though few understand Hebrew…I have no doubt that Conservative Judaism as we understand it could be very attractive in South America...”
Soon Marshall began a youth service using mimeographed selections in Spanish, mixed seating, and a more modern approach. The congregation was pleased but also fearful of the changes. Next he formed a youth group, and in December, after some hard bargaining with their parents, we took 49 young people to our first summer camp, Majane Ramah. Boys and girls together? Making their own beds? Cooking for themselves? Taking daily classes in Judaism as well as sports, arts and crafts and music? Camp was revolutionary and very successful. Not surprisingly, the campers spent a lot of time making fun of our Spanish. Camp was a pivotal influence on these young people and they soon started drawing their parents into this new kind of Judaism. Many of today’s South American rabbis and institutional leaders were formed at that Ramah.
Since it was too hard to create a new vision and fight the status quo at Libertad Synagogue at the same time, Marshall and a group of laypeople created a new community. Bet El, as the new synagogue was called, immediately drew adults and teenagers and eventually became the city’s most well-attended synagogue. It was the first community to have both Sephardi and Ashkenazi members and the first to incorporate social justice into its programs. We met in a donated home and held services in the tented garden. Before we began fundraising for our own building, Marshall insisted that nothing be built unless we as a community also were involved in the reconstruction of a villa miseria, a nearby shantytown. Bet El sent doctors, medical supplies, and money to build its medical clinic.
One of the most important events of the Argentine Jewish world was the 1961 founding of the Seminario Rabínico Latinoamericano. The first non-Orthodox rabbinical school in South America, the Seminario met at the Libertad synagogue before moving to a small donated apartment. It had four students and a staff of three; I taught English. Today, the Seminario’s 62 ordained rabbis are scattered throughout Latin America, the United States, and Israel. The Seminario later opened a teachers college, a supplementary Hebrew high school, a leaders training program, and a cantorial school.
If there were to be students studying Judaism they needed texts they could read, so Marshall edited and we both proofread books about religion for a new series, The Library of Science and History of Religions, in Spanish. At the same time, Marshall and Rabbi Mordejai Edery translated the siddur into Spanish, and followed it with a translation of the machzor.
When we first got to Argentina we had to adjust to a new culture, and it wasn’t always easy. We faced criticism about modernizing the service and debate over Marshall’s participating in ecumenical events. We were yanquis in a strange land, without a language, without friends, and without an appreciation of the local worldview. By necessity we had to learn Spanish. (Today my Spanish is fluent, but I still have a terrible American accent.) We didn’t know that when you are invited for dinner at 9 pm it is impolite to arrive before 9:30, or that Argentine kids are not interested in either baseball or basketball, only in soccer, soccer, and more soccer. We didn’t understand how politicized everything was and that revolution could be frequent. Even an American spelling of Ramah merited an antagonistic cartoon in a Jewish monthly. And of course we were unaccustomed to the daily corruption. When the police threatened to close down the first teen dance we held, Marshall and I panicked until one of the youngsters asked Marshall for some money and went to the policeman to make “arrangements.”
It took us some time to understand the Jewish community. At the time there were some 350,000 Jews in Argentina and 850,000 in all of Latin America. There was a thriving Jewish culture, with two daily Yiddish newspapers and Yiddish theater, and many left-wing Jewish day schools where Yiddish was taught. The AMIA, the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina, the central organization for the Ashkenazi Jewish community, was in charge of education, cemeteries, and kashrut supervision. To be buried in the cemetery, a person had to be a member of the AMIA. There was a parallel organization for Sephardi Jews, who had their own cemeteries and campaigns for Israel. Elections were held for these institutions along Israeli party lines, so you could see flyers in the streets of Buenos Aires saying “Vote for Mapam” or “Vote for the Mapai candidate” for AMIA.
What most unified the community was its fierce loyalty to Israel. There was a large aliyah from Argentina, as from the rest of South America, and the Jewish day schools strongly emphasized Hebrew.
But when we got to Argentina the synagogues were empty. There were 12 rabbis in Argentina, none of them native born. There was no Spanish spoken at services and there were no young people present. In a lecture delivered to United Synagogue in 1971, Marshall said, “I must say that with very few exceptions, that can be easily counted, the synagogue has died in Latin America. Out of the 850,000 Jews, I doubt that there are more than 5,000 attending Friday night services… The synagogues are mainly conducted without rabbis… There is nothing modern in the synagogue, almost nothing that can be related to Latin America of the 20th century. The synagogue is the least important Jewish institution in the continent.”
That is no longer true.
Marshall was who he was, and did what he did, as a result of the influences to which he’d been exposed. The philosophy teachers at Dartmouth College, his alma mater, had a great impact on him. In 1951 the school awarded him a senior fellowship that sent him to the Jewish Theological Seminary to study love and compassion in the midrash under the tutelage of Dr. Abraham Joshua Heschel. Each month he made the trip from New Hampshire to New York City to study with Dr. Heschel. In 1952, Marshall entered the seminary as a rabbinical student but he was way behind the other students. Dr. Heschel suggested a summer at Camp Ramah in the Poconos. That’s where we met.
Marshall often said that everything he knew and everything he did he owed to Dr. Heschel and his prophetic Judaism. In an interview in 1991 with Dr. Edward Kaplan, Marshall told this story:
“I will never forget one seudat shlishit, the third meal on the Sabbath, Dr. Heschel said, ‘You all have, I’m sure, mitzvot or commandments in the Bible that you would like to take out. I would like to make a motion that we take Leviticus 19:18 (thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself) out of the Bible. Gentlemen, you are probably surprised that I am saying that I would like this commandment removed from the Bible. It’s simply impossible to fulfill, and it’s so important. It’s the basis of all civilization.’”
In another part of the interview, Marshall said, “Many years before it was acceptable for theologians to participate in the battle for ethical conduct in government, to speak out against the religious blasphemy of racial prejudice, or to weigh in on the moral inappropriateness of war in general, the prophetic voice of Abraham Joshua Heschel reverberated through the land. Dr. Heschel taught that a religious being had an obligation to remain constantly involved in the life-or-death struggle for the triumph of the Spirit. In an antiwar demonstration, he said to the crowd: ‘This is not a political demonstration, it is a moral convocation, a public assembly for the concern of human rights.’”
As the Jewish community’s spirituality was reinvigorated, the political climate was changing. In 1955, General Juan Domingo Perón had been ousted from power and exiled. In 1973, he returned with his second wife, María Estela Martínez, to reassume the presidency. The result was 10 years of political and social chaos. When Perón died in 1974 his wife took over the presidency and the Rasputin-like Lopez Rega pulled the strings, leading to the devastating military overthrow of the government in March 1976, led by the junta, the heads of the army, navy, and marines.
Anyone who has lived under a fascist military government knows the consequences: fear and chaos. We all felt it, though many chose to ignore it. Many people lived by the advice no te metas – don’t get involved. If you were not involved, they thought, you’d be safe. Many learned that it was not true. There were daily battles, bombs, kidnappings, and disappearances. Students, labor leaders, professors, psychologists – and anyone listed in their phone books – were tortured and killed, or they were made to disappear. Lawyers would not sign a habeas corpus request for fear of being disappeared themselves. Families were afraid to talk to each other. The police, so closely involved with the military, became the enemy. People flooded the foreign embassies to seek haven. U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger told Argentina’s foreign minister, Admiral César Guzzetti, to use all means necessary to subdue the leftists. The Israeli government was in conflict because it was selling arms to Argentina. And the official Jewish community, the AMIA and DAIA, which represented the community to the government, did little to help.
How did this play out in our lives? We were afraid for our three children. They each carried around the numbers of the American, Israeli, and Canadian embassies in case anything happened. At the beginning we were politically naive. We knew our phone was tapped and tried not to say anything important. If people called to speak to Marshall, he would ask them to meet him instead. Our home became a stop on the way out of the country for countless people. I never knew whom I would find sleeping in the living room in the morning.
Once, close friends called, asking us to come to their house immediately. When we got there, we found the front door bashed in and the bedroom in shambles. The mother was hysterical and barely able to talk. The goons had rushed in to take their eldest daughter, who was the friend of a recently disappeared young man. (He never appeared and is presumed dead.) Miraculously, she wasn’t taken, but obviously had to leave the country immediately, so she packed a small bag and left on that night’s ferry to Uruguay. Eventually, under Plan Condor, other South American dictators agreed to collaborate in the disappearances, which made it dangerous to seek safe haven in nearby countries.
Marshall always insisted that he worked in human rights because it was a religious imperative, not to make a political statement. “Many people feel that a rabbi’s job is to talk about a Jewish home and Sabbath observance, but it is empty if it is only this,” he said. “It is an empty Judaism, just as the prophet Isaiah talks about an ‘empty fast’ if you don’t liberate the ties of oppression, feed the hungry, and provide a roof for the homeless.” Marshall visited prisons when he could locate prisoners and tried to tend to the desperate mothers on the Plaza de Mayo. When some of his synagogue members balked, Marshall offered his resignation, which they did not accept.
When the family of Jacobo Timerman called in desperation over Jacobo’s disappearance in 1977, we welcomed them into our home. The noted journalist, owner and director of the daily La Opinión, Timerman was subjected to two and a half years in clandestine prisons, then to house arrest, and eventually was kicked out of the country. When the Timermans were sitting around our Shabbat table, his son Héctor got a call saying that his father had been found. Marshall and Héctor went running out to the supposed location but when they arrived, the officer in charge asked Marshall who he was. Marshall poked his finger into the officer’s shoulder and said: “I’m a pastor. I’ve lost one of my sheep and I think you have him, so give him to me.” We told the Reverend William Sloane Coffin Jr. about the Timerman case when he was a guest in our house. He banged his fist on the table and cried, “So what are we doing here? Let’s go down to the government square and begin a hunger strike.” Héctor laughed. “You’ll die of hunger. No one cares.” When Jacobo Timerman finally was released, after being horribly tortured, we all felt as if we had been let out of prison ourselves.
Was it hard coming back after 25 years? It was unbearable. Two of our three children stayed in Buenos Aires. We found a very different United States than the one we had left so many years earlier. From the mundane – like how to fill our own gas tank, use an ATM machine or a computer – to the more important issues, such as our friends’ lack of understanding of the third world, or their insensitivity to the plight of political refugees, we felt totally out of place. We had lived through terrible times in Argentina, but we found there the human qualities that are irreplaceable: warmth, love, and family.
Naomi Meyer lives in New York City.
