Brazil

The CAHJP have about 260 files recording partially Jewish life across the country of Brazil. Alongside the geographic diversity of the collection, the documents cover the period of modern Jewish settlement in Brazil from the late 19th Century to the 1970s. There are more documents beginning in the 1930s, as a result of the arrival of European Jewish refugees in Brazil, but the bulk of the records cover the period from 1950 to 1977. The collection contains communal material mainly from Belém – from the "Centro Israelita do Pará" (1890-1974) and the main local Jewish communities – as well as from Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. Besides documents from various institutions the collection includes many files from Jewish schools, mainly in Porto Alegre and Rio de Janeiro. From the smaller Jewish communities there are some documents from Amazonas, Bello Horizonte, Itacoatiara, Manaus, Niterói and Santa Maria. Although there are time gaps in the collections, it nonetheless reflects the full-scale installation of Jewish life in Brazil, as evidenced through the establishment of local organizations as well as the relationships forged with national and international institutions. The documents are for the most part written in Portuguese, but also in other languages, like: Yiddish, Hebrew, Spanish and English. Read more