Postwar Latin American Jewry: An agenda for the study of the last five decades

In quantitative and qualitative terms, the years of World War II and the early Cold War period represent a time of growth and consolidation for Latin American Jewry. Jewish arrivals, primarily German-speaking refugees from central Europe, settled in countries where no Jews had lived before, creating new communities in such typically Indo-American states as Ecuador and Bolivia. They also strengthened the Jewish presence in countries like Paraguay and Colombia. The processes of growth and flowering, and sometimes of upheaval and decline, in certain Latin American communities since 1948 have merited very little attention. Bolivia and Ecuador, two Andean, typically Indo-American states, hosted considerable communities by the end of World War II but lost most of their Jewish population soon after the war. The application of the Colombian “catalogue” of problems to other communities-for example, Venezuela-would fill a serious gap: the lack of comparative studies on Latin American Jewry.