Baby Help Pesach: An Intergenerational Celebration of Freedom in Argentina
In the wake of Argentina’s financial collapse in 2001, JDC acted swiftly in cooperation with the local Jewish community to set up diverse social assistance programs, including one which supported vulnerable pregnant mothers and young babies devastated by the economic crisis. Initially begun as a mechanism to alleviate poverty and trauma for single mothers and their young children, the Baby Help program ended up forging a unique community and connection to the larger Jewish people and tradition—a connection that has withstood the worst of Argentina’s crisis and remains until today.
For many Baby Help parents like Cynthia, figuring out how to put food on the table and afford clothes and medicine for their children was all that mattered when the crisis struck Argentina in 2001. Living below the poverty line, in the thick of their challenges, many of these parents did not focus on teaching or keeping Jewish rituals. Today, they are availing themselves of a second chance at exploring their Jewish identities—this time through their children.
Cynthia and her three-year-old daughter Delfina participate actively in Baby Help’s Jewish programming and consider the program’s center—which shares space in the L’Dor V’Dor Jewish campus for the elderly in Buenos Aires—to be their second home.
“Delfina explains to me what Shabbat candles and matzah are and she takes me automatically into memories I thought were lost…but they are still in my heart,” reflects Cynthia. “Coming here to share this celebration with the whole community fills our soul.”
For Cynthia, this connection to Judaism is as important as the critical aid she and her little girl receive from Baby Help. “To see my daughter Delfina grow, enjoy, and learn at Baby Help brings us back in time to when Delfina’s grandfather suffered as a four-year-old child in a post-Holocaust refugee camp. This story finds rest by being re-born, day after day, in Delfina’s face as she enjoys learning within the Jewish community,” shares Cynthia. “To belong to Baby Help means to continue our grandparents’ story. It is to strengthen our values…it is education…it is peace. Baby Help is to be re-born.”
During Passover 2009, Baby Help families gathered together for a communal seder.
Daniela Waldman and her son Santiago, age 2, eagerly awaited the seder night. “Thanks to Baby Help, I have come back to synagogue,” says the young mother. “I start connecting with the community and I am anxiously looking forward to collective celebrations this year. I am very happy that Santiago learns our customs in a way that he can understand and I cannot explain to him.”
For Daniela, the seder’s reality far exceeded her and her son’s expectations. As she sat around the seder table, looking at newfound friends and welcoming faces, she proudly says, “Everything is even more than I thought—a beautiful feeling of belonging and sharing.”
April 2009