Moisés Ville

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Moisés Ville is a small town (comuna) in the province of Santa Fe, Argentina. It was founded in 1889 by Eastern European and Russian Jews escaping pogroms and persecution. The original name intended for the town was Kiryat Moshe ("Town of Moses" in Hebrew), but the land agent who registered the settlement translated it to the French-like Moïsesville which was later hispanized to the current Moisés Ville. It is located about 177 km from the provincial capital, in the San Cristóbal Department. It has 2,572 inhabitants as of the 2001 census [INDEC].

Moisés Ville became the canonical town of the Gauchos Judíos ("Jewish Gauchos") who worked the land in Argentina in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Upward social mobility caused the town to lose population steadily as the younger generations moved to the big cities of Rosario and Buenos Aires in search of education and opportunity.

Moisés Ville, together with its sister colonies of Mauricio and Clara, were the main examples of the work of Baron Maurice de Hirsch's Jewish Colonization Association.

The Communal President of Moisés Ville as of 2005 is Omar Delio Delbino, of the Socialist Party.

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[edit] External links

In Spanish unless otherwise noted.

Municipal information — Municipal Affairs Federal Institute (IFAM), Municipal Affairs Secretariat, Ministry of Interior, Argentina.
Inforama — Municipal information at the official website of the Santa Fe provincial government.
Moisés Ville - Semi-official website.
Jewish Encyclopedia - Agricultural colonies in the Argentine Republic. (English)
JBuff.com - The Argentina Jewish Community. (English)
O'Mara, Richard, "Palestine on the Pampas", Virginia Quarterly Review, Winter 2001 (English)
BBC Report on the Jews of Moises Ville (March 4, 2007)
- The BBC's Buenos Aires correspondent Daniel Schweimler sets off in search of the legendary Jewish Cowboys or Gauchos whose image has been mythologised in Argentine culture. He visits Argentina's oldest rural Jewish community in the northern town of Moises Ville to meet Gaucho Armenio Seiferheld whose family fled to Latin America from Nazi Germany.