WINNIPEG — The Winnipeg Jewish community’s effort, starting in the late 1990s, to boost its size by recruiting Argentine Jews has been a tremendous success, but it’s not likely to be repeated in the near future, a panel discussion concluded here recently.

An audience of about 50 people attending the May 15 Jewish Heritage Centre of Western Canada event heard that the retention ratio for Argentine Jewish families who have settled in Winnipeg in recent years is just under 90 per cent, well above the provincial retention rate for new immigrants.

Larry Hurtig, a past president of the Jewish Federation of Winnipeg who was directly involved in the initial recruitment efforts, said many of the Argentines have become involved in the federation and organizations such as Camp Massad and the Chai Folk Ensemble.

“Some of them are going to be our future community leaders,” he said.

The panel consisted of Argentine Jewish immigrants Hernan Popper, a business executive, and Iael Besendorf, who works for the Jewish Child and Family Service in its resettlement program; Evelyn Hecht, who served as the federation’s immigration officer at the height of the Argentine immigration, and Jorge Nallim, an Argentine-born assistant professor of Latin American history at the University of Manitoba.

Nallim, the first speaker, presented an overview of Argentine Jewish history.

He said the Jewish presence in Argentina started to become noticeable with the huge wave of immigration from eastern and southern Europe between 1880 and 1930, in response to a huge demand for labour in the early 20th century.

In the 1890s, Argentina’s Jewish population was about 10,000, he said. By 1910, it had reached 75,000. It peaked in 1960 at about 310,000, with the great majority living in Buenos Aires. The current Jewish population is about 200,000.

While Argentina has never been an anti-Semitic country, Nallim said, it has had some anti-Semitism. Yiddish-speaking, left-leaning Russian Jewish immigrants were considered a communist element in the interwar years. There was also a famous influx of German and Croatian Nazis into Argentina after the war. And during the rule of the military junta from 1976 to 1993, Jews accounted for 10 per cent of the 9,000 Argentines murdered by the junta and the 30,000 or so “disappeared.”

In recent years, the country’s economic collapse pushed thousands of Argentine Jews to leave for Israel, Spain and North America.

But the story of the Argentine Jewish immigration to Winnipeg began because of a chance meeting, Hecht said.

In 1995, Janice Filmon, wife of then-Manitoba premier Gary Filmon, found herself sitting next to a Jewish Argentine on a plane. He was looking to immigrate to Toronto. She persuaded him to consider Winnipeg instead. He was impressed by what he saw and suggested that the community send representatives to Buenos Aires to meet with other Argentine Jewish families who were considering leaving.

It was a fortuitous combination of circumstances. The Winnipeg Jewish population had been in decline for more than 30 years and the community was beginning to take action to try to reverse the trend. At the same time, the provincial government, in a effort to bolster Manitoba’s population, was introducing a new, targeted immigration program outside of the federal one.

After Hurtig and his son, Jack, along with a provincial government representative, visited Argentina in 1995 and met with government officials and Jewish community members, the Jewish Federation of Winnipeg also established a website in Spanish promoting the city.

“We had 44 families come between 1996 and 2002, 70 come in 2003 and 40 more in 2004,” Hecht said. “We have had a few more since.”

There were follow-up federation missions to Buenos Aires in the late 1990s, as well as in 2001 and 2003, with Hecht herself among the emissaries.

And, she pointed out, the Winnipeg Jewish community provided a welcome reception for Jewish Argentines coming here for exploratory visits or immigrating.

Besendorf spoke about the central role of the Jewish Child and Family Service in helping Argentine newcomers.

“It is a huge transition process,” she said. “We help with finding employment and housing, registering their children in schools and Jewish camps, referring immigrants to English language classes and teaching them how the system works here,”

Besendorf experienced the sense of culture shock first hand when she and her family came to Winnipeg in 2002.

“You go through a honeymoon phase at first while you are busy settling in,” she said. “After that, you begin to realize how different the culture is in your new home. Then you gradually integrate your old and new cultures.”

Job searching is a major challenge.

“You have to learn to expect to start at a level below your expectations,” she said.

“It takes time to work your way up” and “language barriers may also impede employment opportunities at the beginning,” she added.

She said most Jewish Argentines who have come here have found work close to what they were looking for and have developed “a real sense of belonging here.”

Popper, a business development and market executive, said his decision to leave Argentina was sparked by the economic crisis that reached its nadir in December 2001.

“My brother had attended a meeting with a Winnipeg delegation in May 2001, around the time our son was born,” Popper recalled. “He wasn’t interested in coming to Winnipeg, but after seeing the violence that broke out in December  2001, my wife and I decided that we wanted to leave…

“I got Evelyn’s [Hecht] e-mail address from my brother and wrote her. She replied in 15 minutes.”

He and his family came on an exploratory visit and were impressed with the people they met.

“We found a very warm welcome here,” he said. “Our daughter, Samantha, was born in Winnipeg in 2004. It was hard leaving behind people we loved. It was a struggle at the beginning. But we have done well here.”

Hecht said she doesn’t foresee many Argentines coming again soon, other than perhaps parents and siblings of immigrants coming for reasons of family unification.

She noted that the economic crisis impoverished large numbers of the Jewish middle class in Argentina, making it hard to come up with the money they need to apply to come to Manitoba and Canada.

According to the conditions of the Manitoba Provincial Nominee Program, applicants must pay a $975 visa fee and show that they have at least $10,000 for the head of the family and $2,000 each for other family member to cover initial costs here. They also have to pay their own airfare, and there are occupational requirements.