History of the Jews in Bolivia

Jewish presence in what is now Bolivia dates to the Spanish conquest and colonization beginning in the early sixteenth century.[1] The settlers were Conversos — Spanish Jews who had formally converted to Christianity, referred to in the historical literature as Marranos — who arrived in territory then part of the Viceroyalty of Peru.[2] Some reportedly worked in the silver mines of Potosí during the sixteenth-century mining boom, finding economic success in mining and commerce, while others were among the pioneers who founded Santa Cruz de la Sierra in 1557.[2][3]

Despite their outward conversion, these settlers faced persecution from the Spanish Inquisition and from local authorities in Potosí and La Paz, who accused them of drawing local people toward Jewish practice.[1] Facing this pressure, most Jewish families relocated to Santa Cruz, then a remote and isolated settlement where the Inquisition was considerably less active.[1] The Inquisition was formally established in Peru in 1570, and the surviving documentation from the colonial period consists almost entirely of Inquisition records — a circumstance that historians regard as signaling the incipient end of the organized Marrano community in the region.[2]

Some researchers have pointed to customs maintained by certain old families in the Santa Cruz region — including lighting candles on Friday nights and sitting on the ground while mourning a close relative — as possible indicators of Jewish ancestry.[2] These customs are suggestive rather than conclusive, and the claim that they reflect Converso descent should be understood as a possibility, not an established genealogical finding.[2]

Substantial Jewish settlement did not resume until the twentieth century.[2] A small group of Russian Jews settled in Bolivia in 1905, followed by a group from Argentina and, later, several Sephardi families from Turkey and the Near East.[2][3] Despite these arrivals, the community remained extremely small: estimates place the Jewish population at only 20–25 practicing Jews in 1917, and sources report just 30 Jewish families in the country in 1933.[1][2]

Bolivia during this period was not a primary destination for Jewish migrants. A Hebrew Union College study of Progressive Judaism in South America notes that fledgling Jewish communities appeared between the World Wars in several South American countries — Bolivia among them, alongside Paraguay, Ecuador, and Colombia — partly because Argentina had become more restrictive, pushing immigrants to seek entry wherever they could.[4] The rise of fascism in Europe and tightening immigration laws elsewhere accelerated this dispersal toward less obvious destinations.

The rise of Nazism in Germany from 1933 onward transformed Bolivia into a significant, if unexpected, destination for Jewish refugees. After the Chaco War with Paraguay (1932–1935), President Germán Busch sought to revive Bolivia's economy by admitting European immigrants.[5] Mauricio (Moritz) Hochschild, a German-Jewish mining magnate who controlled approximately one-third of Bolivia's mineral production and maintained political ties to Busch, used this opening to facilitate the regular arrival of German and Austrian Jewish refugees.[5] They obtained visas through Bolivian consulates in Zurich, Paris, London, Berlin, and Vienna.[5]

Refugees traveled by ship to Arica, Chile, and then by train to La Paz on a route that became known as the Express Judio — the "Jewish Express."[5] Working with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, Hochschild established reception facilities for new arrivals.[5] His organization, the Sociedad de Protección a los Inmigrantes Israelitas (SOPRO, also rendered SOPRA), maintained offices in La Paz, Cochabamba, Potosí, Sucre, Oruro, and Tarija.[5] The World Jewish Congress credits Hochschild specifically with enabling approximately 9,000 German Jews to find refuge in Bolivia, within an overall influx it describes as 12,000 German Jewish immigrants.[1]

Estimates of the total wartime influx vary considerably across sources and time periods. A 1944 study by Arieh Tartakower and Kurt R. Grossman estimated that about 7,000 Jewish immigrants had arrived by the end of 1942, with a statistical table recording 6,423 Jewish immigrants for 1939–1942 specifically.[6] The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum states that Bolivia admitted more than 20,000 Jewish refugees between 1938 and 1941, while a separate USHMM article places the figure at around 30,000 for that period.[5][7] A 1994 review citing a Joint Distribution Committee estimate placed the number of Jews who entered Bolivia during 1933–1943 at between 5,000 and 15,000.[8] These figures cover different stated periods, use different definitions, and are not reconciled in the source material; they should be understood as a range of historical estimates rather than a single settled count.

Many of those who arrived did not stay. The World Jewish Congress characterizes Bolivia primarily as a transit route, noting that most newcomers eventually moved on to Argentina, Chile, the United States, or Uruguay.[1] Researchers have documented that many refugees crossed Bolivia's porous borders illegally into neighboring countries: Argentine statistics from 1947 showed that approximately 85 percent of 520 foreigners arriving by rail at La Quiaca, on the Argentine-Bolivian border, sought to enter Argentina without meeting its requirements.[8] A JDC estimate cited in the same review suggested that as many as 3,000 Jews crossed into Argentina during part of 1940–1941 alone.[8]

Bolivia's initially relatively open door began to close as refugee numbers grew and political currents shifted. In 1939, Bolivia modified its immigration policy in line with restrictions adopted across Latin America, barring entry to nationals of Axis powers.[2] Discontent arose after authorities discovered that many Jewish immigrants who had entered on agricultural visas were working instead in commerce and industry.[2] On May 3, 1940, the Bolivian Immigration Commission ordered that Jewish immigration be suspended indefinitely, though in practice immigration continued.[6][2]

The official hostility toward Jewish newcomers was visible in policy documents. A decree made public in La Paz on May 6, 1940, stated explicitly: "It is prohibited in general terms for national consuls to provide passports and tourist visas to semitic elements."[9] That regulation had been incorporated into general tourism rules on November 24, 1939.[9] The American Jewish Committee also reports that public anxiety over Jewish refugees preceded a 1939 raid by the Bolivian Secret Police on the Jewish community center in La Paz, and that anti-Jewish attacks appeared in the press during the same period.[9]

In late November 1941, a U.S. National Archives account of Chilean diplomatic reporting states that Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Brazil, and Bolivia agreed not to accept "illegal Jewish immigrants" — specifically excluding Jews who lacked proper exit visas from their countries of origin.[10] The source does not describe how Bolivia implemented that agreement in practice.

Wartime pressures also reached Jewish residents already living in Bolivia. Following a December 1943 coup, Bolivia's new government — not yet recognized by the United States — was compelled in May 1944 to hand over a number of German and Japanese citizens to American authorities.[11] The National Library of Israel's account notes that some transfers lacked proper justification, but does not specify the number of people involved or identify how many, if any, were Jewish.[11] Separately, a broader U.S. wartime policy saw 81 Jews among 4,707 Axis-country citizens brought from Latin America interned in U.S. camps; some experienced antisemitic harassment, and Jewish detainees were eventually transferred to a separate facility near Algiers, Louisiana.[11] The account does not specify how many of those detainees had come from Bolivia.[11]

As immigration peaked in fall 1939, organized Jewish communal life gained greater stability. The Círculo Israelita, founded by East European Jews in 1935, was the first Jewish organization established in Bolivia; it was followed by the German Comunidad Israelita.[2] By 1940, Jewish communities had formed in La Paz, Cochabamba, Oruro, Sucre, Tarija, and Potosí.[2] Under the umbrella of the Comité Central Judío de Bolivia, communities established a range of institutions: a Hevra Kaddisha, a Jewish cemetery, Bikkur Holim, a home for the aged, WIZO chapters, and Maccabi sports clubs.[2][12]

The Colegio Israelita in La Paz offered kindergarten, primary, and secondary education.[2] Its academic reputation attracted non-Jewish students, resulting in a mixed student body — a pattern the International Jewish Cemetery Project also confirms for the later Colegio Boliviano Israelita, most of whose students are not Jewish.[12] A German-language weekly and monthly Jewish press served the community, reflecting the predominantly Ashkenazi character of Bolivian Jewry.[13]

Economic hardship was common among immigrants who did not own businesses. The Tartakower-Grossman study reported that 85 percent of European Jews in Bolivia worked in commerce, while 5 percent each were in skilled trades, farming, and the liberal professions.[6] About 2,800 immigrants were concentrated in La Paz and 1,000 in Cochabamba, with the rest scattered around the country.[6] One-fifth of the refugees were receiving relief.[6] From January 1939 through December 1942, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and SOPRO disbursed $160,000 in relief funds.[2][6]

Cochabamba became Bolivia's second-largest Jewish community, with about 600 Jewish residents at its mid-twentieth-century peak.[2] The community's early development was closely associated with Isaac Antaki, an Alexandrian Jew who arrived in the 1920s, established a large textile factory, and built a synagogue to serve both Ashkenazi and Sephardi congregants.[2] Cochabamba's Jewish population reached its height after World War II and then declined sharply during the 1950s through emigration.[2]

The work of Rabbi Paul Hirsch illustrates the educational and religious dimensions of community life during this period. His rabbinical seminary in Breslau had been closed by the Nazis in November 1938 before he could be ordained; Hirsch subsequently went to La Paz, where he served a newly established congregation and directed a Jewish elementary school.[4] About eighteen months later he moved to Oruro to perform similar duties, returning to La Paz in 1950 to again lead the congregation and school, to which he added a secondary department.[4] Four years later he was called to Buenos Aires.[4]

A World Jewish Congress report covering 1949–1951 identifies the Comité Central Judio de Bolivia as the community's representative body, affiliated with the WJC and comprising the major Jewish organizations.[14] The report names the Comunidad Israelita, the Círculo Israelita, and the Federación Sionista Unida among its constituent bodies.[14] A WJC emissary visited at the end of 1949 to attend to organizational matters; in August 1950 the Federación Sionista Unida of La Paz held its seventh annual convention; and in January 1951 the community celebrated the opening of its own building.[14]

The 1953 WJC Affiliates Guide estimated Bolivia's Jewish community at about 4,000, describing it as 90 percent Ashkenazi and 10 percent Sephardi, with the Sephardim not separately organized.[13] It identified communities in La Paz, Cochabamba, Oruro, Sucre, Potosí, Tarija, and Santa Cruz, and recorded Jewish schools in La Paz and Cochabamba, homes for the aged, sick, and orphans, and an active Zionist organizational structure.[13] A 1960 population table similarly estimated 4,000 Jews in Bolivia against a general population of approximately 3,462,000.[15]

After World War II, the community received two further additions. European Jewish refugees who had remained in Bolivia during the war settled across the country, and a postwar wave of Polish immigrants joined them.[1] A smaller but notable group — Polish Jews who had fled eastward after 1939, taken refuge in Shanghai, and then left following the communist takeover of China — eventually arrived in Bolivia, with most settling in La Paz and joining the existing community.[2]

The World Jewish Congress estimates that about 5,000 Jews lived in Bolivia by the late 1940s, though the International Jewish Cemetery Project puts the peak figure at 10,000 in the same period — a discrepancy that reflects the broader difficulty of reconciling estimates from different sources.[1][12] The 1944 Tartakower-Grossman account estimated approximately 4,800 European Jews remaining in the country at that time.[6]

Mass emigration set in during the 1950s and 1960s, driven by political upheaval.[2] Jewish education reflected the community's contraction: student enrollment, particularly in the lower grades, declined sharply.[2] An Encyclopedia.com estimate placed the late-1980s Jewish population at approximately 6,000, a figure higher than most other cited estimates for that period and not reconciled by the source.[16] By the 1990s, the community was believed to number about 700; demographer Sergio Della Pergola of Hebrew University estimated 500 Jews in Bolivia in 1999, most of them in La Paz.[1]

Bolivia's relationship with the Jewish state began on a cooperative note. Bolivia voted in favor of establishing the State of Israel at the United Nations in 1947 and was among the first countries to recognize Israel after its declaration of independence.[17] Bolivian Jewish Community president Ricardo Udler stated in a 2025 address to the UN Human Rights Council that Bolivia had been one of the few Latin American countries to grant visas to Holocaust survivors fleeing Nazism.[18]

Relations between Bolivia and Israel deteriorated after the left-wing MAS party came to power. On January 14, 2009, President Evo Morales announced that Bolivia was breaking diplomatic relations with Israel, expelling Israel's ambassador and urging that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and President Shimon Peres be declared war criminals.[19] The World Jewish Congress records that the declaration called Israel a "terrorist and genocidal state," while the American Jewish Committee's account describes Morales as characterizing Israel's treatment of Palestinians as "a genocide" — a difference in framing between the two sources.[1][20] Bolivia simultaneously warmed its relations with Iran.[17]

The diplomatic break had immediate consequences on the ground. A U.S. House resolution submitted the following month reported that on January 21, 2009, vandals removed a large Star of David from a monument in Plaza Israel in La Paz, spray-painted "plaza Palestina" over Judaic murals, and left a burning American flag at the site.[19] The resolution called on Bolivia and other governments to protect their Jewish communities and denounce anti-Jewish media coverage.[19]

Diplomatic relations were briefly restored in 2019 under Bolivia's transitional government after Morales was ousted, then frozen again after the subsequent government took office and officially severed once more in October 2023.[17] After Rodrigo Paz's election in October 2025, Israel and Bolivia formally restored diplomatic relations on December 9, 2025, when their foreign ministers signed an agreement in Washington.[17] A January 2026 Israeli delegation visit found the Jewish community small but closely connected, with members describing long-standing hopes for renewed ties and the restoration as significant both diplomatically and for communal identity.[21]

The period following Bolivia's severance of ties with Israel saw a documented rise in antisemitic incidents. The American Jewish Committee's September 2014 statement called on President Morales to address antisemitism and reported specific attacks on Jewish institutions in Cochabamba: a dynamite attack damaged the main Jewish cemetery on the preceding Saturday, and stones and Molotov cocktails were thrown at the synagogue in April and July of that year.[20] The AJC attributed the rise in attacks to Morales's hostility toward Israel, though that causal characterization reflected the views of AJC representatives and was not presented as an independently established finding.[20]

The U.S. State Department's 2014 human-rights report confirmed the same incidents — stones and Molotov cocktails thrown at the Cochabamba synagogue in April and July, and a stick of dynamite thrown into the city's main Jewish cemetery on September 13 — and noted that police did not investigate any of them.[22] The State Department's 2015 excerpts on antisemitism reported that Jewish leaders found the public frequently conflated Jews with Israelis, and that at least one opinion columnist invoked the Holocaust while criticizing Israel, suggesting that descendants of Jewish children saved during the Holocaust were alive to "oppress the Palestinians."[23]

By 2023, the community's situation showed some signs of resilience alongside continuing challenges. The State Department reported approximately 180 Jews in Bolivia that year.[24] After the October 7 Hamas attacks, religious leaders reported antisemitic hate comments on social media.[24] Yet the same report noted Jewish and Muslim communities working together through interfaith dialogue; at a September 21 interfaith event, a Jewish representative invited others into the synagogue, saying: "The synagogue is my home and also yours."[24]

Today's Jewish community in Bolivia is small, geographically dispersed, and institutionally active relative to its size. The World Jewish Congress describes the current community as approximately 500 members, with most in La Paz and smaller populations in Cochabamba and Santa Cruz de la Sierra.[1] The Berman Jewish DataBank's 2023 world Jewish population estimate also lists 500 Jews in Bolivia as of January 1, 2023, though the estimate carries a "C" accuracy rating reflecting reliance on less recent sources.[25] A U.S. State Department religious-freedom report placed the figure at roughly 600 for 2008 and approximately 650 for 2009, while reports for 2014 and 2015 described a population of fewer than 500.[26][22] The 2023 State Department report gave an estimate of approximately 180, suggesting continued decline.[24]

Each of the three main communities — La Paz, Cochabamba, and Santa Cruz — maintains a Jewish cemetery, communal headquarters, and synagogue.[1] La Paz's congregation is Orthodox, Cochabamba's is Conservative, and Santa Cruz's is Reformist.[1] The Círculo Israelita de Bolivia serves as the central communal organization, recognized by the Bolivian government and formed from the merger of the earlier Círculo Israelita de La Paz and the German Comunidad Israelita de Bolivia.[12] It maintains a cemetery, Bikkur Holim, two synagogues, and a home for the aged, with WIZO branches in La Paz and Santa Cruz and Maccabi sports clubs active in the community.[12]

The World Jewish Congress reports that Bolivia has no Jewish school currently operating as such, though communities in Cochabamba and Santa Cruz run Sunday schools for local children.[1] A JewishGen profile drawing on information dated 2003–2005 described the Colegio Boliviano Israelita in La Paz as providing kindergarten, primary, and secondary schooling, with most of its students non-Jewish.[12] The National Library of Israel's Archives of the Jewish People holds nine files concerning the German-speaking Jewish community of Cochabamba, identified as the "Comunidad Israelita," spanning 1945 to 1988 and including materials in Hebrew, German, Spanish, and Yiddish — a documentary record of the community's multilingual character across four decades.[27]

A Jewish museum located approximately an hour from La Paz opened in 2014 with support from the Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany, providing a physical site of memory for the community's wartime history.[1] Academic scholarship on the community includes León Enrique Bieber's chapter "Presencia judía en Bolivia: la ola inmigratoria de 1938–1940," published in the 1989 German-language volume Europäische Juden in Lateinamerika and cataloged by the National Library of Israel as a study of the immigration wave of that period.[28]

The Jewish Virtual Library attributes considerable community contraction after Evo Morales took office in 2005 to his government's policies and reports that the La Paz community decreased by approximately 10 percent.[2] It also records community leaders' warning that no Jews might remain in Bolivia within 10 to 20 years if trends continued.[2] Younger community members have emigrated for educational and professional opportunities in the United States and Europe, while some established members left for political reasons.[2] Despite these pressures, organized Jewish life has persisted in Bolivia for more than a century, with the community's survival across periods of mass immigration, restrictive policies, political hostility, and antisemitic violence constituting a distinctive chapter in Latin American Jewish history.