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Brazilian Jews, who are largely upper middle class, are stepping up to aid the impoverished, densely populated areas where social distancing is difficult.
(JTA) — In April, Rebeca Posternak and her parents went out for a sushi dinner to celebrate her 23rd birthday in Boa Viagem, a suburb of her native city of Recife, Brazil.
Throughout much of Brazil, and in Recife especially, people with money in their wallets keep their time on the street at a minimum for fear of robbery. But because of social distancing connected to the coronavirus, the sushi restaurant had fewer seats and the Posternaks had to wait outside for a table.
A homeless beggar approached them to ask for water to drink and bread. The man explained that he used to sleep comfortably on the beach, but Brazilian beaches (they have taps with empty drinking water) were closed to stop the spread of infections. This has forced the man to sleep on the streets, where other older people like him threaten to be attacked by younger people.
“He had been chased out of the restaurant before he approached us,” Posternak said. “They treated him as if he were garbage.”
This assembly puts Posternak in touch with his privilege.
“But it also exposed me to aspects of reality for many, many people that we haven’t even considered, that we don’t see on the news,” she said.
When they returned from the sushi restaurant, the Posternaks had to convert their family’s confectionery and pastry shop, called Doce de Comer, into a soup kitchen.
They hired store workers as chefs and packers, and Posternak’s mother, Luciana, recruited her Jewish friends from the local branch of the foreign Jewish-Zionist women’s organization Naamat. Today, a dozen members of this organization and other Jewish women in Recife prepare about 400 meals a week at the Posternaks store that are distributed on the streets of Recife and in the poorest neighborhoods, called favelas.
The grassroots operation is one of dozens of coronavirus-related aid initiatives by Jews in Brazil, which is among the countries hardest hit by the pandemic. In Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo and Porto Alegre, among other places, the local branches of the CONIB federation of Jewish organizations mounted charity drives that have collected money, food and protective gear for medical staff and needy populations.
Rabbi Gilberto Ventura and his wife, Jacqueline, the founders of the Sao Paulo-based Sinagoga Sem Fronteiras, or Synagogue Without Borders congregation, have been distributing food packages in that city, Brazil’s largest municipality.
“There has been an impressive mobilization on the part of Brazilian Jews during this period,” said the rabbi, whose own aid operation is funded through Sao Paulo Jewish philanthropists William Jedwab and Silvia Kaminsky. “Brazilian Jews are reacting far beyond their means to this tragedy. »
Brazil has the second-highest coronavirus death rate in South America, with 140 deaths per million inhabitants, or about 30,000 deaths. Especially in the poor north and interior of the country, in cities like Manaus, public hospitals, many of which were insufficient before the pandemic, have been defeated by the pandemic.
In Brazil, the situation is confusing through a political crisis that has led to the resignation of two health ministers and an open dispute between President Jair Bolsonaro, who opposes a general confinement, and the governors of the states that govern them. have. tax.
“There’s a lot of confusion about what is supposed to be done and what isn’t supposed to be done, and that doesn’t serve to prevent the spread of the virus,” said Andrea Engelsberg, a volunteer who runs with the Posternaks and a local aid organization called Novo. Jeito to distribute the food they prepare in homes.
To Engelsberg, a 53-year-old economist and mother of two, the volunteer work is “humanitarian and universal,” and not necessarily rooted in her Jewish identity. But for Posternak, “it’s a mitzvah, something that’s rooted in my Jewish culture and upbringing.” She attended Brazil’s oldest Jewish school, Moyses Chvarts, which was established over a century ago in Recife, and now studies psychology.
Brazil’s favelas are infamously densely neighborhoods, often featuring small, ramshackle apartments and shops. They’re overpopulated, unsanitary and hotbeds of crime usually avoided by police and other civil servants. Some dwellings have no running water and dangerous messes of electric wiring.
“The conditions I saw are terrible,” Engelsberg said. “Sewers are backed up, sanitary supplies are missing and in the favelas, families are living in such crowded conditions that social distancing is not practically possible.”
The lockdown imposed in many Brazilian states and cities has pushed countless working-class families, who had been struggling to make ends meet, into the neediest category, according to Gilsom Garcia, a social welfare activist from Sao Paulo and a father of three who has been unable to find work as an electrician during the pandemic.
“It’s a domino effect: the blockade has eliminated the only source of income for thousands of families whose breadwinners work with very few or no benefits as drivers and cleaners for the richest households,” García said.
At the end of 2019, Brazil had 6 million nationals – more than any other country in the world – and most of them operated without contracts or social benefits, according to the Rede Globo channel.
“COVID-19 has pushed many of those working-class families into excessive poverty,” said García, 35, a father of three.
The food packages have the potential to save lives with more tactics than simply offering nutrition, said Garcia, who delivers the packages at the initiative of Rabbi Ventura.
“There are government food distribution points, but people queue up there without maintaining social distancing, coughing on one another,” he added. “Delivering food to people’s homes reduces this exposure.”
By contrast, infections among the Jewish community, which in Brazil is largely prosperous and educated, have been minimal and only a handful of members have died from COVID-19.
Most Brazilian Jews, predominantly Ashkenazi and descendants of others who fled Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, live in gated communities or apartment buildings in large cities. Many are unaffiliated, but the organized communities of Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo have huge memberships, prestigious summer camps, popular Jewish schools, and cultural activities.
So, for the most part, Brazilian Jews have the means to remain safer than many other compatriots during the pandemic.
Conditions, however, are worse in Brazil’s new Jewish communities, which have many Bnei Anousim, other people of Sephardic origin who recently discovered their Judaism or returned to it centuries after their ancestors. hidden for fear of persecution by the Portuguese Inquisition.
“None of our members are in very bad condition, however, there are some families in the network who are going through difficult times, locked up with six other people in a two-bedroom apartment with a bathroom,” said Gershom Manoel de Lima, president of the Ohel Avraham congregation in Recife.
It is basically made up of bnei anusim, its network of a few dozen members created in recent years under Ventura’s leadership.
“We give them everything we can,” de Lima said.
Bnei Anousim communities tend to come with other working-class people from working-class neighborhoods where few Ashkenazi Jews live. Conditions in those neighborhoods are much better than in the favelas, but less wealthy than in upper-middle-class luxury apartment blocks. Middle-class Brazilian Jews.
About 2,000 kilometers southeast of Recife, in the federal capital of Brasilia, Edson Mendanha and Nádia Vitorino, a couple of Bnei Anusim descent who converted to Orthodox Judaism several years ago, distribute food to those in need and try to get infected. They are waiting “for life to return to normal,” Mendanha said.
He reconsidered his wording.
“In fact, things may never go back to normal. Maybe they shouldn’t do it,” Mendanha said. “This pandemic has revealed worrying disorders in our society and our politics. They will have to change.
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