Argentina - Special Briefing

Buenos Aires, February 2002

A young man, well dressed, holding a baby in his arms, is standing at a busy intersection of an affluent suburb of Buenos Aires. From my car I watch as the light changes: the man is not crossing the road; instead, he walks along the line of idling cars, asking the drivers politely for money. "I have to feed my baby," he explains, avoiding eye-contact.

The stores in Buenos Aires are now divided into three categories: stores that are still open have signs posted: LIQUIDATION. other stores have signs FOR RENT and the third category - are just locked and boarded.

Shanty towns, make-shift homes of cardboard and tin, are evident now all over the city, often a few hundred yards from the most elegant streets. The streets are safer, I am reassured by a friend: no more mugging, since even the would-be muggers realize that no pedestrian has cash anymore.

The banks, walled-in behind their enormous palacial structures, no longer function as banks - rather they mark venues for public anger and demonstration. "Our money is inside - and we are outside, and both losing our value everyday," is a bitter common expression in Argentina..

The Jewish community is hit hard -- 80% of the Jews were members of the middle class: small business owners, merchants, professionals. they lost their jobs, they ran out of money and then their savings evaporated in the recent banking melt-down. Without money, some people are simply hungry. They are the "sudden poor:" Poverty ambushed them and hit them suddenly - and they are lost. Some 21,000 Jews are now welfare cases, helped by the JDC through the community.

In ORT school, the teachers noticed that students could not concentrate in class - and discovered the students had nothing to eat at home.Other students in Jewish school dropped out, having no money for tuition. When next school year opens, in mid-March, a picture of gloom will unveil: 30% to 50% of the Jewish students will not show up. More schools will collapse, sending their staff and teachers to the streets.

In Beit El synagogue, Rabbi Dani Goldman operates a soup kitchen that feeds 600 people a day. Some of the congregants that used to come to Beit El with their new-model cars struggle now to find the 1 peso for a bus ride to the soup kitchen, says the Rabbi. "It is hard to turn one's soul to spiritual help when one's stomach is emty," he adds.

In the JDC-supported soup kitchen "Comedores Populares" I see people dressed in suits that give away the secret that they were well-to-do until recently. Now - this meal is their only one for the day. The director tells me that among them are the former presidents and leaders of well known Zionist organizations.

Self-respect and pride make life even harder for the "sudden poor:" From time to time they are spotted eating in Catholic churches soup kitchen. Why not go to a Jewish place? To the social worker who try to help them the explain: we are too ashamed to beg in a place where we were leaders.

Next month, after six month of defaulting on rent and mortgage payments, families may be evicted from their homes and sent peso-less to the streets.

The staff of the Anerican Jewish Joint Distribution Committeee in Buenos Aires works 20 hours a day, fighting the monstrous avalanch that threatens to bury the Jewish community. Their priorities are clear: Food for the hungry, medicines to the sick, cash assistance to families who are about to be evicted. Efforts to strengthen the community structure and to support the fabric of Jewish life come after that. At least $8.7 million is needed to ensureno Argentinian Jew goes to sleep hungry, cold or without shelter.

Ricardo Schusterman, the JDC chief social worker in Buenos Aires sums it up in a chilling way: "I feel that poverty is consuming us one by one: first went the business employees, then the business owners, then the professionals: Lawyers, Doctors, architects, then property owners - and the end is not yet near."

Buenos Aires' wide avenues and magnificent buildings still remind the visitor of Paris. The look in the eyes of the people, though, is the look one confronts in Minsk and Moscow and Kiev: Desperation and loss of hope.

by Amir Shaviv