You might completely miss El Once if you stroll through it on a December evening. No marching band, no enormous menorah on a plaza, nothing designed for a picture. Just a fabric store closing early, a shopkeeper in a kippah locking a metal gate, and candles already lit somewhere behind a buzzer-operated door. That’s the essence of Hanukkah in Buenos Aires: it’s persistent, present, and oddly quiet for a city with one of the world’s largest Jewish populations.
It’s important to keep in mind how that population arrived. Millions of European immigrants arrived in Argentina between 1880 and 1930, including Italians, Spaniards, Germans, and Ashkenazi Jews escaping pogroms in Russia and Poland. Later, those fleeing Nazism itself joined this group. They weren’t faced with a blank canvas. In the same years that the city was building its Subte, the first subterranean railroad in Latin America, which debuted in 1913, they constructed one of their own. The timing of a community relocating to a city that was literally going underground for the first time also has an almost poetic quality.
The same immigrant pool that occupied union halls and synagogues also supplied the Subte’s early workforce. Among the men who dug those first tunnels were Polish and other Eastern European Jewish laborers, according to stories, some of which are documented and some of which are more akin to local legend, such as the kind recounted in Alejandro Magnone’s film “Subte-Polska”. The symbolism has endured whether or not every detail can be scrutinized. There has always been an underground aspect to Jewish life in Buenos Aires; they are present everywhere but not particularly noticeable.
After bombs destroyed the Israeli embassy and the AMIA community center in 1992 and 1994, killing numerous people, that trait solidified into something more intentional. Since then, synagogue security has become so strict that a passport number is typically required before visiting one of the city’s magnificent temples, such as Templo Libertad, which has three naves and pews for a thousand. No one wanted Hanukkah to become secretive. It started being cautious. It is evident that there is a difference.
Candles are therefore lit behind gates, in school courtyards guarded by guards, in the back rooms of kosher bakeries close to Gran Templo Paso, and in apartments above El Once’s clothing stalls. In good years, public menorah lightings are held by Chabad and other organizations, and they attract large crowds. However, the more stable and consistent version of the holiday resides in areas that were never intended for public access, which could be the reason why the scene seems more enduring than theatrical. No one is performing.
With all the enormous menorahs and press pictures, it’s difficult to ignore the contrast with how Hanukkah is promoted elsewhere. The holiday appears to have remained more true to its former form in Buenos Aires, where it is small, family-oriented, cautious, and deeply ingrained in areas that were never intended to be tourist destinations. It’s unclear if that will alter as younger generations relocate from El Once to less Jewish areas of the city. The population, which is still the largest Jewish population in Latin America and is estimated to be between 180,000 and 250,000, has remained relatively stable for years despite changes in geography, according to demographers who monitor the community.
The instinct is largely what endures. Pogroms, a dictatorship, two unsolved bombings, and a city that welcomed an extraordinary number of strangers in a brief period of decades and essentially asked them to figure out where they fit all shaped this instinct. Buenos Aires’ Hanukkah is similar to the Subte in that it is underneath everything, simple to ignore, and still operational after more than a century.