A High Altitude Congregation.

• Author: Luxner, Larry

MEMBERS OF the Circulo Israelita in La Paz like to joke that when praying, they feel closer to God than any other Jewish congregation in the world. After all, at an altitude of over twelve thousand feet, this is the highest synagogue on earth. It is also one of the most remote, considering that fewer than seven hundred Jews live in this mountainous, overwhelmingly Catholic country in the heart of South America.

"We are a small congregation, but we're very active," says Rabbi Palti Somerstein. "We have Shabbos services every Friday night and every Saturday morning and afternoon. We also have classes twice a week where the kids learn Hebrew and Jewish history."

When Somerstein, a conservative rabbi from Buenos Aries, arrived in La Paz four years ago, the tiny community had been without a religious leader for twenty years. And when he leaves this summer, no one is sure where the next rabbi will come from.

The problem is that Bolivia's Jewish presence--which began in the sixteenth century and reached its zenith right after World War II--has been dwindling for decades. According to historians, Jewish settlement in Bolivia dates from the colonial period, when "secret Jews" from Spain, called Marranos, arrived to work in the vast silver mines of Potosi. Others are known to have been among the pioneers who founded Santa Cruz de la Sierra in 1557 under the leadership of Nulfo de Chaves.

The real wave of Jewish immigration to Bolivia did not begin, however, until the early nineteenth century. In 1905, a group of Russian Jews arrived in La Paz; several years later, a handful of Sephardic Jews came from Turkey and Syria. Yet as late as 1933, the year Hitler grabbed power in Germany, there were still only thirty Jewish families in the entire country.

Things changed rather suddenly with the rise of Nazi persecution in Europe. Bolivia granted thousands of visas to stranded German, Polish, and Russian Jews in search of a homeland. After the war, between 1946 and 1952, another wave of Jews--Holocaust survivors from...