1 MEMORY OF THE WORLD REGISTER Collection of the Center of Documentation and Investigation of the Ashkenazi Community in Mexico (16th to 20th Century) (Mexico) Ref N° 2008-11 PART A 1.- SUMMARY The Center of Documentation and Investigation of the Ashkenazi Community of Mexico keeps, preserves and disseminates the Ashkenazi culture, the culture of the Jewish people that was on the verge of disappearing during the Nazi era. It also safeguards the historic memory of the Jewish minority in Mexico that arrived from Central and Eastern Europe. Introduction. From the end of the 19th century the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe decided to emigrate towards America so as to find better living conditions. At that moment, large groups of Jews cut their ties to the lands in which they had developed a way of life, a language (Yiddish) and a manner of being: the Ashkenazi. Their former life ended violently and forever. At first, because of the pogroms unleashed by the Cossacks and Ukrainians, at the dawn of the 20th century by the First World War and the Bolshevik Revolution, but mostly from the rise of Nazism in Germany in the 30s that led to the loss of six million people and thus to the disappearance of the Jewish communities of Central and Eastern Europe. At that moment, the Ashkenazi culture was threatened with extinction once the study centers and places for creating culture were wiped out during the Second World War. The few survivors of the Holocaust bore upon their shoulders the difficult task of rescuing themselves and their Jewish identity that had been so heavily menaced during the six years of war, the ghettos and the concentration and extermination camps. The responsibility for rescuing that culture fell on the shoulders of the Latin American communities that took over the job of safeguarding the culture of their ancestors. When the religious and cultural centers disappeared because of the Holocaust, there was only a remnant of material which was rescued by the Allied Army in 1945 in the city of Offenbach, Germany. Thousand of books that had been confiscated by the Nazis had been stored there. Returning them to their original libraries was out of question because their caretakers had all been killed. It was decided to resort to the already established Jewish communities in Latin America and Mexico was one of the depositories that received 1,000 of those books rescued by the Allies which were lodged at the library of the Ashkenazi community. Immigration to Mexico. Immigration to the New World had begun from the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th. The most important treasures brought by those immigrants were their most valuable books, many of which would later disappear in the ashes of the Holocaust. The migratory flow swerved towards Latin America due to the quotas that were instituted in the United States beginning in 1921. During the war, the doors into the United States were closed off to refugees, as happened in most of the Latin American countries as well. Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Uruguay, Venezuela and Costa Rica were among the countries that attracted the first immigrants in the 20th century. People of Ashkenazi origin arrived in these areas looking foremost for a place to survive economically and to continue with their Jewish identity, culture and traditions. Thus, in the first two decades of the last century, Jews coming from countries such as Russia, Poland, Rumania, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Austria, Germany and France settled in Mexico. Their 2 store of knowledge was very important since most of them were familiar with their own culture and with the productions of universal culture. Foundation of the community. To retain their identity and continuity for the coming generations, they founded a community very similar in its functions to what they had left behind them in Europe. It was called Nidjei Israel (1922). The Jews in Mexico separated by sectors, according to their place of origin, such as the Ashkenazi, the Sephardic and the Arabic speakers, that is, Jews arriving from Syria and Lebanon. The latter eventually separated from those originally from Damascus into their Monte Sinaí Community and those from Aleppo into the Maguen David Community. Originally, everybody had been united in one sole community in 1912 which was called Alianza Beneficencia Monte Sinaí. They established a synagogue, a small school and bought land for a cemetery. The Ashkenazi community was the first one to separate because of differences in praying and traditions. Then they began developing several welfare and assistance institutions such as the Chamber of Commerce, the OSE clinic, the old people’s home in Cuernavaca called Eshel, as well as schools and synagogues. Its members had arrived with diverse ideologies like Zionism, Socialism or Communism and Bundism, which gave way to the creation of several cultural centers and the edition of various magazines and newspapers. Among the most important organizations there was the club called Young Men’s Hebrew Association founded by a group of US Jews who arrived in Mexico fleeing from the military draft in the years of the First World War. This club and its members were the basis for the creation of other institutions in the Ashkenazi sector as the center of community life. Creation of the Center of Documentation. Each organization was charged with safeguarding its files, documents and particularly its libraries. However, although the idea of forming a center of documentation had been considered since the 50s, it was only established towards the end of the 20th century. In 1993, beginning with the edition of the seven books that form part of Generaciones Judías en México (Jewish Generations in Mexico), the Ashkenazi Kehillah (1922-1992) decided to create a Center of Documentation and Investigation of the Ashkenazi Community in Mexico. By that time it was deemed basic to rescue the Ashkenazi culture, its literary, religious, historic production as well as the life of those communities that had vanished. Thus, several libraries of former centers were rescued creating a valuable body in the field of letters and periodicals as well as the rescue of files of various institutions created in the country. This way two urgent lines of preservation were presented: the first one, of the Ashkenazi culture and the second, of the history of the Jews in Mexico, which just like other non-national minorities that arrived in the country at the beginning of the 20th century are part of the multicultural and pluriethnic history of the country. It was of great importance to stress that this Jewish minority was part of Mexican history and the knowledge of its archives was fundamental to be aware of the local or regional history that contributed an important part to national history. The Center or CDICA is made up by collections that date back to the 16th up to the 20th century. There is a library where the Fonds for Antique Hebrew Books, the Fonds Mexico and that of Translations into Yiddish and Hebrew are among the most significant, together with a Library of periodicals with the first newspapers edited in Yiddish in the country and an Archive that contains the collections of the various institutions of the Ashkenazi sector. Among these is that of the Comité Central Israelita (Jewish Central Committee) that became the representative organization of the community before the Mexican government along with that of the Chamber of Commerce, a Graphic File with 8000 photographs of the one hundred years of the establishment of the community and an oral history file that includes more than 200 interviews made to immigrants, intellectuals, community leaders, etc. The CDICA is unique in its type; its collections are priceless because they are unique and irreplaceable; these documents of the cultural, religious or social institutions and organizations are 3 unique because they are original, usually handwritten in Yiddish together with religious books or Yiddish translations of world culture that only flourished during a lapse of time in the 19th and 20th centuries when they were edited in Europe. The fact that they are part of the history of the country opens a new window of research not only about Mexican history but also towards the history of Jewish life and culture in Latin America. The CDICA is unique in Mexico and in Latin America because the one in Argentina suffered a terrorist attack and is still in the process of recovery, both the building and its collections. The other Jewish communities in Latin America such as Chile only have a Center of Jewish studies that is located inside the local University; there is another one in Brazil, also at the University, dedicated to the study of crypto Judaism. There are centers of documentation in Europe, one in Paris, France and another one in Warsaw, Poland that is still not catalogued and contains only manuscripts. The Center of Documentation and Investigation of the Ashkenazi Community of Mexico is part of the specialized educational and research of the immigration of the Ashkenazi Jews to this country that is done at the Universidad Hebraica and the 14 Jewish schools. The library has 16 000 printed books from the XVIth century to the present and all the manuscripts from the Ashkenazi institutions in Mexico. The specialization and theme focus mainly on the humanities; all aspects of jewish studies and cultural history. The collections are maintained in the Ashkenazi Synagogue Complex in Mexico where they are since the complex was built in 1957. We can assert that these collections are of cultural and social importance to Mexico, as they reflect the cultural and social history of a community that has contributed substantially to the progress of the country.