Archives of the Regional Historical Museum of the Jewish Colonies of Villa Dominguez

Texts & Photos by Karen Berestovoy (*)

The Regional Museum of Villa Dominguez carries out multiple items referring to Jewish culture, the development of the national agrarian economy and the formation of the work cooperatives. Its interest falls so much in the Jewish culture as in Argentine History.

Room of the Museum of the Jewish Colonies.

This museum was created 14 years ago by initiative of historian Celia Lopez, who made an extensive research on Jewish immigration to Argentina. A group of descendants of immigrants donated then the material for the exhibit. Vestiges of the recent past are also represented in buildings like the synagogue of San Gregorio (from 1893) , and the House of the administrator of the Jewish Colonization Association, 7 km away from Dominguez.

Archive of the Museum. The old oak desk belongs to the first pharmacy of the town.

Today members of the museum are working in a project of preservation of the records of the MHRC, which aims to create a proper infrastructure and systems for bringing out together the collection of documents, preserving indefinitely the patrimony of the town.

The Regional Museum of the Jewish Colonies.

The first stage of the project took place last September and consisted in making a preliminary diagnosis of the state of conservation of most of the records in the archive. This study finally give us a distinct and realistic view of the main problems in the collection. This first stage was supported by Jay Foomberg, from California, who recognized the importance of creating a system adapted for the preservation of these records.

At the moment, along with the director of the Museum, we are working in the second stage of the project, which consists in the mechanical and superficial cleaning of the 750 photographs that conform the collection and a re-cataloguing on new items (registering of engineering and historical data of each photo and the reproduction of the image).

To preserve these objects without sharing them with the community is a half made job. This is why we have created an exhibition and a photographic contest, in which we will expose to the community of Dominguez the work which we are doing and will invite them to collaborate.

Materials for the second stage (1500 Xerox copies and envelopes) were donated by individuals and by the Water Cooperative of the town; the public library has allowed the unlimited use of its computer and printer. Because the City Council (on which the museum administratively depends ), does not have a cultural department, the project cannot be a part of it. Support from the city hall consists in sending correspondence and allowe the fax and telephone.

People of Villa Dominguez has an outstanding historical sense and aesthetic value. In the town and its environs we could found still intact, the sheds of the European immigrants, the 'cremería' where milk products were elaborated and even the little cemetery with collective tombs of the people who died after an epidemic of Typhus.

This it is a site with 120 years of history, based on a an intellectual and culturally complex European immigratory group, whose memory deserves to remain intact in this Museum.

(*) Photographer and Historian of Art UISEK

The Jewish Colonist

In the middle of the last century Europe was surrended by vicissitude, war and poverty, and the Jewish people from Russia endured the long and bloody persecution by the czarist regime. In those same years Argentina supported immigration from abroad whereas Europe favored emigration as a solution to the socioeconomical problems.

Those were the main circumstances leading to the Jewish colonization of Entre Rios. Beginning in 1892, under the patronizing hand of Jewish Colonization Association founded in London by philanthropist Baron Maurice Hirsch, the extensive colonies obtained great results in agriculture, in addition to cultural profits in the basis of cooperativism.

One of the requirements of the JCA was that the places to be acquired would be the nearest to a railway station so that the cooperatives could easily carry out their crops for sale. In 1890 Gobernador Dominguez Station had been created in the Department Villaguay, and the surrounding land was then acquired by a delegation of Baron Hirsch to establish Colonia Clara, named after his wife, Clara Hirsch. In March of 1892 the first group of 245 families arrived to Dominguez, thus beginning the dream of the Jewish colonies. Towards the eve of the 1900's, a number of 452 families had definitively settled down in the 198.000 acres of the cooperative.

Synagogue of San Gregorio

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