Learning to Be a Committed Sephardi Youth Leader: Israel, Youth, and Argentina, 1960s–70s

In the late 1950s, the Jewish Agency sent one emissary to Argentina in order to better attract the Sephardi communities to Zionist activities.  While in the country, Josef Mehujas paid special attention to organizing the Sephardi Youth, spurring the creation of several youth Zionist groups in the last years of the decade.  Of particular importance was the sending of various Sephardi young men and women to a training seminar in Israel.  At their return, these men and women were expected to become the leaders of youth groups within Sephardi organizations, which they dutifully did.  Although Mehujas returned to Israel in 1960, and orphaned the newly created youth structures for a short time, the Jewish Agency sent new emissaries in 1962 and in 1966.  In 1967, as a result of these policies, Argentine Sephardi Youth organized its first National Conference in order to better carry out their work.

It is clear that the Jewish Agency believed that youth involvement was central to the spreading of the Zionist ideal to Argentine Sephardim.  The emissaries sent and the seminars organized to train youth leaders attest to that.  This paper will focus on the ways in which these Youth leaders understood the roles they would play as youth Zionist leaders in Argentina.  Caught between two forces, migrating to Israel or staying in Argentina to lead the Sephardi Youth (which was the alternative what their parents would have preferred), these young men and women constructed discursive spaces that allowed them to situate themselves both in Argentina and as part of the new Jewish State.  Using oral interviews, newspaper and magazine accounts, and archival information, the paper will argue that, unlike what other historians have suggested, these Sephardi young men and women understood how these two ‘national’ identities could compliment, rather than contradict, each other.