I know very little of the journey aboard the ship. In its issue from December 9, 1894, the newspaper Ha-Tzfira noted that the collection of books being brought by Reuben Sinay had increased to 120 pudi. The “pood” is a Russian unit of mass, and converting this gives us an incredible figure of two metric tons. Additionally, he brought 2 pudi (32 kilos) of items necessary for worship: tefillin, or phylacteries, to be wrapped around the arms, and mezuzot, to be hung in doorframes. Moisés Ville was a desert, then, onto which material as well as spiritual and cultural structures had to be erected.
The ship was called Corania, and it set out on November 11 from the port of Liepāja (or Libau), four hundred kilometers north of Grodno in the present-day territory of Latvia. This was the largest port in the Baltic Sea and that with the greatest traffic of Russian immigrants headed for America: the people from Grodno were camouflaged there, lost in a human avalanche swirling together to board the ocean liners, shoals of little children crying and holding tight to their mothers’ hands, fathers carrying trunks and knotted sacks, keeping sight of each of their baskets, suitcases, bundles, canary cages, even rope-tied cows, and all of them dreaming of the unknown that lay across the seas, of New York riches or the Pampas around Buenos Aires. Of a radically new life.
As I write this, I bring out another article by Mijl Hacohen Sinay, “Harab Reuben Hacohen Sinay” (where “Harab” is another way of saying “Rabbi”), a short biography that my great-grandfather dedicated to his own father and published in issue III of the Argentiner IWO Shriftn in 1945. “In 1894, my father abandoned Russia and came to Argentina,” he wrote. “He was impelled to leave by the difficulties that Jews were enduring in Russia and by an aspiration for his children (five male and one female) to become workers of the land and lead a productive life.”
They spent a month and a half at sea. The Ambasch, Radovitzky, Bloch, Epstein, Singer, Skidelsky, Katzovitz, Kaller, Kaplan, Teitelbaum, Kohn, and Trumper families were some of those who, day after day, shared a horizon with the Sinays: all of them would forever be shifbrider, ship brothers, united by a slow journey of over ten thousand kilometers. A distant — very distant — cousin once told me that the voyage had been marked by tragedy. She, an elderly woman named Silvia, lived in a suburb of the city of Rosario, where she ran a produce market, and where I had gone specifically to listen to her tales.
I went to visit on a sunny November day and waited a while in the doorway before she turned up, on a moped. We stared at each other in surprise: we didn’t look like we came from the same family — she was a bit closer to criollo, hardened by the Paraná sun; I still bore the pallor of the East. Silvia invited me in, and we entered a house with construction at the back. After offering me a soda, she produced a briefcase from somewhere:
“It’s the only thing I have left of my dad,” she said as she opened it.
There wasn’t much inside. Only an appointment book, a notepad, a few family photos, some papers. All seemed to have been left just as it was the last time her father put it away.
We chatted for a long time; our small families had never come in contact despite the fact that all of us were Sinays. Her great-grandfather’s name was Aharon Leib (or León), and he was one of Mijl’s brothers. There beside her father’s flattened briefcase, Silvia told me we shared the same great-great-grandfather. She couldn’t remember Mordejai Reuben Hacohen Sinay’s name, but she was sure that he’d been the first rabbi in Argentina. And that his wife had met a tragic fate: that of dying at sea.
“One of the donkeys in the hold kicked her, and she died,” she told me. “It also kicked Leib, one of her sons, and he was taken for dead, but then later, when they were holding a vigil for him, they realized he was still breathing.”
It wasn’t rare for an immigrant to bring their donkey when they traveled or for the animal to grow restless inside the hold of an ocean liner — a hold that, what’s more, must have been packed not only with donkeys but also horses, cows, oxen, and all manner of baggage, as well as passengers whom I imagine being reduced, after several months on the ocean, to their purest animal nature.
However, sometime later, I confirmed that the incident was a myth: Rifka (or Rebeca) Rakhil Skibelsky de Sinay had been punctiliously recorded in the 1895 Argentine census as “Reina Sinay.” Apart from that, there was yet another myth: Mordejai Reuben Hacohen Sinay was not the first rabbi in the country. At least two others had preceded him: the Englishman Henry Joseph and the Podolier pioneer Aharon Halevi Goldman. Just as it is in Moisés Ville, in the heart of the Sinay family — even to the present day, as with any family of immigrants — there seems to be an indefinite number of myths floating around.
In reality, the journey across the ocean had been ordinary. Of course, when the sea’s fury made the heavy ship Corania dance about like a nutshell, panic did infect the 277 immigrants. But when the sun came out, everything took on the calm of a postcard. At long last, on Thursday, December 27, 1894, my ancestors arrived in Buenos Aires.
***
The Hotel de Inmigrantes, standing at the river’s edge, was the first gate into a country eager for hands ready to work. When the Sinay family arrived, around 1,195,000 European immigrants had already landed in the country, and many had stayed in that hotel. My great-great-grand-father was lucky: he spent only a single night there, along with his children (five sons: Joseph Mijl or Miguel, Jaim Zeev or Jaime, Aharon Leib or León, Moshe Zalmen or Moisés, and Abraham Shmuel or Samuel; and one daughter: Jaia Lea or Leontina) and his wife, Rifka Rakhil (or Rebeca) Skibelsky. The next morning they set out again, this time on board a train headed for Palacios, the station nearest Moisés Ville, the colony they had heard so much about.
All day long the track advanced sluggishly; in a way, the Pampas were yet another ocean.
They arrived on a Saturday and were lodged for the night in one of the railway sheds their Podolier brethren had come to know so well. Five years along, there was no longer hardship but food and embraces, there beneath the battering of an intense nocturnal storm. Michel Cohan, the administrator appointed by the JCA to command the fates of the forty-nine families now being duplicated, was also waiting for them at the end of the line, along with his entourage. (And the next morning, that of Sunday, December 30, 1894, he would guide them on the eighteen-kilometer stretch from Palacios to the center of the Moisés Ville colony.) Cohan was a robust and vigorous sort, originally from Białystok despite his French name. His figure remained steady against the storm that buffeted the scene; while the new arrivals were running for shelter, their leader stood firm as if the rain did not exist.
Over the nine years he spent in Moisés Ville, from 1893 to 1902, Cohan laid the foundations for the growth that was to come, but he also left a mark of iron discipline. For a long time, his name had repercussions in the hearts of my family: my great-grandfather Mijl took it upon himself, even until his final days, to question the man’s achievements and point out his cruelties. For, at the turn of that century, Michel Cohan had become my great-great-grandfather Rabbi Mordejai Reuben Hacohen Sinay’s worst enemy, excluding him from a simple life in the colony.
***
Grodno, the place that had been left behind, comes back to me again and again. Like the writer Alberto Gerchunoff, who at the beginning of The Jewish Gauchos describes Tulchin — the distant Ukrainian origin he brings his colonists from — as a “sordid” and “snow-covered” metropolis, I wonder how dark and cold Grodno must have been. That city, almost as far north as Moscow or Copenhagen (and, for that matter, equidistant between the two), would surely let the sun’s rays touch it only rarely.
Today, Grodno is one of the larger urban centers of the country known as Belarus or Byelorussia or White Russia, which as I write these lines is governed by Aleksandr Lukashenko, a president friendly with Russia, Cuba, and Venezuela. Since his ascent to power in 1994, he has been, according to his supporters, the only man in Eastern Europe to have created a capitalist system incorporating the best elements of Soviet socialism, or, according to his detractors, simply Europe’s last dictator.
Although it has a cathedral named for Saint Francis Xavier and a church of Saints Boris and Gleb, in the 1890s Grodno was a city of Jews: they were the major leaders in commercial, industrial, and educational endeavors. The Great Synagogue — erected in the sixteenth century — was famous throughout the East. And the Haskalah (the enlightenment that permeated Eastern Judaism) and the newly arisen Zionism had many supporters in Grodno.
I read, in the biographical sketch of my great-great-grandfather written by his son, that this was the setting where Mordejai Reuben Hacohen Sinay — in turn the son of another rabbi, Aharon — grew up. The latter died in 1853, leaving his son an orphan. One of the boy’s uncles, Zeev Skibelsky (the father of Rifka Rakhil, Mordejai Reuben’s cousin and future wife), took charge of him. And one of their cousins discerned in him the qualities needed for a religious life and sent the boy to a yeshiva in Kaunas, from which Mordejai Reuben emerged at age eighteen transformed into a rabbi. My great-great-grandfather then returned to Grodno but, influenced by the winds of enlightenment, chose instead to make his way as a teacher, giving private Hebrew and Bible lessons.
His son — my great-grandfather—was born on December 3, 1877, in the neighboring town of Zabłudów. In an autobiographical piece entitled “Vegn main eigener vinikait” (On my personal conscience), published in issue III–IV of the magazine Grodner Opklangen from September 1950, my great-grandfather recalled how he was educated from a young age in Grodno. They lived in a house that contained a library packed full of books in Hebrew and Yiddish, and they received nearly all the Jewish and Russian periodicals of that era. Mordejai Reuben was also a frequent contributor to several publications and followed the news about Zionism and American immigration with great interest. Between 1881 and 1900, some 770,000 Jews — one-fifth of the inhabitants of the Pale of Settlement — would depart.
The majority of Russian Jews believed that the solution to their problems lay outside the czarist empire, but part of the issue was where to go. In 1895, Doctor Theodor Herzl and Baron de Hirsch held a meeting in Paris. In a letter, the Zionist leader had been so bold as to inform the millionaire that he didn’t believe in charities and had offered him a new plan, more in line with the actions of Baron Edmond James de Rothschild, who was financing the people emigrating to Israel, forerunners in the practice of real Zionism.
With little enthusiasm, Hirsch agreed to receive him. Herzl, awed by the figure of the magnate, had bought himself a new pair of gloves and then rumpled them so it wouldn’t be noticeable: he wanted to be more of a snob than the magnate himself. Seeking support for his plans, he very quickly solicited the same thing of him as he had of other wealthy people: a sum of several million to buy lands close to Jerusalem. “Delusions!” Hirsch raged. “Rich Jews don’t just hand over … I bet Rothschild signs for less than five hundred francs!” Doctor Herzl was surprised: “You speak as if you were a socialist!” “And so I am,” the other responded. “I’m ready to give it all away … if and when the other rich people do the same.”
But Herzl left empty-handed.
There was no turning back: Hirsch had already started up the machinery of the JCA, which was building its bridges toward Argentina. Between colonization and Zionism, between Hirsch and Herzl, between Russia and Palestine, between Argentina and the United States, between the newspapers Ha-Melitz and Ha-Tzfira: it was one of those moments when everything seemed to be up for debate.
For his part, Mordejai Reuben Hacohen Sinay, who occupied the position of a community leader in Grodno given that he had founded a Zionist center in 1884, sensed the call drawing closer. A well-off cousin of his, one Abraham Frumkin, who was the central committee’s representative in that city and needed to assemble an initial group of colonists to send to Argentina, was the one who convinced him to board the ship. Finally, in 1894, the bells of destiny rang for my great-great-grandfather.
/ / /
The Murders of Moisés Ville: The Rise and Fall of the Jerusalem of South America, published on February 8, 2022 by Restless Books.