Bruria Elnecavé: Making Sephardim, and Women, Visible

Abstract

Bruria Elnecavé:Making Sephardim, and Women, Visible Adriana M. Brodsky (bio) Keywords Argentina, B'nai B'rith, diaspora, Israel, Sephardim, WIZO, women, Zionism When Bruria Elnecavé (née Benbassat) arrived from Palestine to Argentina in 1938 in her early twenties, she fell into depression. Together with her husband Nissim, they had lived on a kibbutz, hoping to fulfill the dream of becoming pioneers. But after three years, due to a health condition that Bruria developed while in Palestine, they had to leave that dream behind and join Nissim's family in Buenos Aires. "I felt like a 'ioredet,'" she remembers.1 "My dream had been to live out my ideals in Israel […] and [they] had been frustrated," she wrote. "I could not get rid of that label."2 Bruria's "failure" to live in Palestine colored her initial days in Buenos Aires. "I would hide inside a tall armoire and cry bitterly," she confessed.3 But the life she created after the initial shock of the dream unfulfilled—a life that came to be defined by a commitment to the existence of Israel, to bringing Zionism to Jewish Argentine women, to being active within a variety of Jewish circles and not just at home (the purported woman's domain)—suggests that Bruria learned to find importance of her work in the diaspora. Bruria's choices after those initial painful years gave shape to a definition of Zionism centered around diasporic experience and work that provided guidance and moved her to action. Her life also makes visible the important work carried out by women and by Sephardim in community, political, and social affairs. Until 1935, Bruria Elnecavé lived in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, in a middleclass household that spoke Ladino. Her parents sent the three children to [End Page 525] Jewish schools, where Bruria learned Hebrew and attended meetings of Ha-Shomer Ha-Tsa'ir, the youth movement that fomented aliyah. At one of their outdoor camps, Bruria met Nissim, who had been born in Istanbul but was finishing his studies in Sofia. When Nissim returned to Bulgaria after a few years in Buenos Aires, they married in 1935 and prepared to realize their dream. But life on the kibbutz was harsh, and Bruria held a variety of jobs for which she was not prepared. By 1938, it was clear that her health could not be tended to in the precarious conditions of the kibbutz; Nissim's parents sent them the money to join them in Buenos Aires. In Buenos Aires, the steps that Bruria took after the initial shock of finding herself with no friends, with her family back in Bulgaria and her dreams unfulfilled, resembled the steps that many immigrants took to adjust. Her husband's family's friends became the first acquaintances with whom she could speak Hebrew. Bruria also began attending Jewish social (and religious) institutions belonging to Sephardi groups: the social Jewish club "Chalom" (founded by Jews from Rhodes), and the Sephardi youth group from the neighborhood of Flores that later created the Zionist group Acción Sionista. Bruria and Nissim sought the company of people they found familiar. She also participated in the Consejo Juvenil Sionista founded in 1945 by, among others, her husband Nissim. Importantly, Acción Sionista and the Consejo Juvenil Sionista comprised both Ashkenazim and Sephardim, so her circle expanded from exclusively Sephardim. Her experiences in Bulgaria and then in Palestine had prepared her for working alongside Ashkenazim. In her memoirs, Bruria hinted that it was her husband who nudged her, "as [her] children were growing up," to join a Jewish women's organization. She first joined in the Sephardi sector of WIZO (the Women's International Zionist Organization), which Alegre Bonomo, another tireless Sephardi leader, had created in 1946. This option might have felt comfortable; the group likely included women she had encountered socially or in zionist groups she had already frequented. It was during a talk on Theodor Herzl that Bruria delivered for the Sephardi branch that she met the president of WIZO-Argentina, Berta Gerchunoff, sister-in-law of the famous writer Alberto Gerchunoff. Berta invited her on the spot to become the director of the cultural department...