Jewish agricultural settlement of Moisés Ville founded in Argentina

Background. In 1887, Jewish communal leaders from Podolia and Bessarabia met in Katowice, Silesia, to discuss emigration in response to anti-Jewish violence and increasing restrictions on Jewish life in the Russian Empire. Back in Paris, Loewenthal submitted a written project to Rabbi Zadoc Kahn for the agricultural colonization of Jewish families in Argentina, proposing a Colonizing Association that would allocate each family a farm of 50 to 100 hectares at a cost of US$2000 per family. Separately, Jewish settlers in dire economic straits appealed to the German Jewish philanthropist Baron Maurice de Hirsch, who founded the Jewish Colonization Association, which helped manage the various colonies.

Founding. Moisés Ville was founded on 23 October 1889 by Eastern European and Russian Jews escaping pogroms. The original name, Kiryat Moshe, was chosen by Rabbi Aharon Halevi Goldman, who compared the community’s escape from Russian tyranny to Moses leading Jews out of slavery. The settlement is regarded as the first agricultural Jewish settlement in South America.

Legacy. Cemeteries founded the base of the community, bonding immigrants to the land. Moisés Ville became the canonical town of the 'Jewish Gauchos' who worked the land in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The town preserves documents and objects relating to Jewish colonization, and its cultural heritage remains present through religious practices and Yiddish-language memory.