Religious Migrants from Peru to Israel

Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Last month, some of you will remember we had a great conversation with Graciela Mochkofsky, the new dean of the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY about Spanish language media. She mentioned she had a new book coming out. We invited her back for that. It turns out that in the new book, she tells a fascinating and little-known story of a kind of religious prophet, you might call him, who inspired hundreds of Peruvian Christians to convert to Judaism in the mid-20th century.

The book Chronicles the journey of Segundo Villanueva as a carpenter in a small farming village in the Andes, his journey to becoming a prophet who would start a Jewish community that would eventually migrate to the West Bank. The book also credits him for inspiring the wave of Latin American Jewish communities we see today, or at least some of them and it's political history, as much as it is religious history class and economic status would complicate this mass conversion just as it does today with increasingly hostile immigration policies in various places, in ideas of what it takes to truly be part of religion.

The New Yorker writer, Judi Thurman says of this book. If Gabriel Garcia Marquez had written the Old Testament, it might read like Graciela Mochkofsky's staggeringly true account of a humble Peruvian carpenter's spiritual Odyssey from a shack in the Andes via the Amazon through the promised land of Israel with a community of devoted followers that from Judith Thurman in The New Yorker.

We are so pleased that Graciela Mochkofsky is back to tell us more about the book. It's called The Prophet of the Andes: An Unlikely Journey to the Promised Land. She's also a contributing writer for The New Yorker. Again, we recently had her on the show to talk about an article she had in that magazine about disinformation campaigns in the Spanish-speaking community and the Spanish-language media. We'll also talk in this conversation, some about her new role as Dean of the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY, which we didn't get into in our last conversation. Graciela Dean Mochkofsky, thank you for joining us, and welcome back to the show.

Graciela Mochkofsky: Thank you. Thank you for having me again. I appreciate it.

Brian Lehrer: Let's start with your new book. Can you tell our listeners a little bit about what got you interested in this of all stories?

Graciela Mochkofsky: Yes. I'm originally from Argentina. I was in Buenos Aires in 2003. I found a letter in the internet by a rabbi from Upstate New York who was asking for donations for this community who had converted from Catholicism to Judaism and were now living in Israel. The letter was actually full of errors and mistakes, but it had enough about Segundo Villanueva and his community that it really caught my attention.

At the bottom of the letter, there was a phone number for people who wanted to donate. Out of an impulse, I just ran to the phone and I called the number and the rabbi had passed, but his widow pick up the phone and we spoke in Spanish and she gave me the first account of this community and the phone numbers in the West Bank settlement where Segundo and his family were living. That's how we started.

I've been working on that story for a very long time. It took a lot of travel travels and I got very lucky because I got some fellowships that helped me complete it, but basically-- Even today it's a story that I find astonishing and surprising. It's a story full of twists and turns. It's very unexpected where it goes. It really talks to me about the seek for truth and how hard that is to find and also identity and immigration. As you mentioned, it has other components that have to do with religion and politics. As a story, I think it's an incredibly compelling story. I hope the readers would be as surprised as they go through it as I was when I was reporting it.

Brian Lehrer: You put in the author's note in the book, something personal that for years you struggled with a need that you felt to reconcile your Catholic education with a pervasive assumption that with a last name, so clearly Jewish to Argentinian ears, Mochkofsky, that you had to be Jewish yourself. I guess I should ask what is your religious background and how did that pervasive assumption and that tension that you described there play into your interest in the Segundo Villanueva story?

Graciela Mochkofsky: What I explained there is that I'm the daughter of a Jewish father and a Catholic mother. For those who don't know this, Argentina still has a very large and rich, and strong Jewish community. It used to have the third largest Jewish community in the world outside of Israel and the US. Buenos Aires is a very Jewish city in the way New York is a very Jewish city.

I grew up in the provinces in smaller towns. My father is an atheist and a Jewish man and my mom is a religious Catholic woman. She goes to mass and things like that. When I was nine, she decided that I wanted to become a Catholic- We are four siblings. -and two of us were baptized and sent to Catholic school. For years I went to nun schools and I was told that my father was not going to be saved. His soul was not going to be saved because he wasn't baptized. I tried to convert him just to save him when I was a child. It wasn't as much as a religious identity to me. It was just these two different identities and cultures that were very much part of mine.

Jewish identity is very much part of my identity, the way I live it and feel it. For a long time, I felt also I was far removed from my Jewish family because my father is not traditionally so we did not do anything Jewish at home. We didn't do the holidays. Then when I grew up, I realized that I abandoned religion. I am not religious anymore. This is not the book of a religious person. This is really the book of a journalist. I consider myself agnostic. I'm not a religious person as I thought, but I could relate with these people who were navigating being Catholic first and then trying to stop being Catholic and being Jewish in a very Catholic society where they lived in, the Andes.

Brian Lehrer: Who is Segundo Villanueva the so-called 'Prophet of the Andes', as the title of your book labels him?

Graciela Mochkofsky: I'll explain about the title later. He was not really a prophet in any formal way. Segundo passed away. He died in 2008 and he's buried in the Mount of Olive cemetery now in Israel. Way before that, he was born in the '20s in a very remote Hamlet in the Andes, in the North of Peru. Everyone was Catholic around him, his father was a farmer at Campesino. His father was murdered in the early '40s when Segundo was a teenager.

The only thing that Segundo inherited from his father really was a Bible. A Bible that was a Protestant Bible that was hidden in a trunk and that the family had no idea that existed or that his father had been reading at all. He studied-- That is the beginning of the story and basically, Segundo spent the rest of his long life, reading this Bible and every other Bible in Spanish that could get a hold of really, really trying to understand what is it that God was telling him through these pages and really trying to decipher these actually serious, very complicated books that had a lot of mystery to Segundo.

He was convinced that the key to how he had to live his life was in this book and he just had to read it and understanding and discuss it long enough until he would go figure that out. That led him from Catholicism to-- He abandoned that church, he became a Seventh Day Adventist and then part of a radical group within the Seventh Day Adventist Movement in Peru, then he created his own church and moved his followers to the Amazon jungle.

When they were there in the late '60s, he discovered Judaism through a series of accidents and then he realized that was the answer and they needed to be Jewish. They lived like Orthodox Jews for more than 20 years in the Pacific coast of Peru. Then until they were finally discovered, or found by a group of rabbis from Jerusalem who had them and converted them and helped them emigrate to Israel, but of all places in Israel, they took them to the Jewish settlements in the northern West Bank, because the rabbis were part of the settler movement, and they had their political agenda.

Once he was there, Segundo lost his community to the local rabbis who knew more about Judaism than he ever did, and he became very bitter about that. He ended up not really embracing rabbinical Judaism, and he kept looking. He died, really, in 2008, still looking, still trying to find the truth that he had been searching for his entire life.

Brian Lehrer: That's some story of a seeker of his spiritual journey. He went from one religion to another religion to another religion and wound up being even alienated from that, at the end of his life. Did he wind up feeling like he had attained some kind of ultimate spiritual truths? Because I think those kinds of seekers are looking for something they would classify as that.

Graciela Mochkofsky: I think he was looking for some kind of purity that was not attainable, and at the end of his life, he was very bitter, he went back to Peru to try to-- The thing he really wanted and he needed was a community to talk about the Bible with. He wanted this communal reading, collective reading meant everything to him, and he thought that's the way they could go deeper and deeper and deeper. When he lost that community, that was devastating.

Everybody else just chose a synagogue and a rabbi, this is around 200 people who followed him, including his own family. Just losing that relevance and leadership over his own community and losing the community, it was mostly men he discussed the Bible with. That was quite devastating. Then he got dementia, and he lost his mind. It's hard to say. His family couldn't really say what was going through his mind, the final years of his life. There's something of a tragic ending there, and I do think that it talks for us who then go through this life, that can learn about it.

It really talks about or tells us about how hard it is to find purity and to find truth if that's what we're looking for.

Brian Lehrer: In our remaining minutes. I want to pivot now to your new role as dean of the Craig Newmark School of Journalism at CUNY. Congratulations.

Graciela Mochkofsky: Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: You are now the only, as I understand it, only Latina woman leading a graduate journalism program in the country. Do you want to take a moment to reflect on the significance of that?

Graciela Mochkofsky: Thank you. I think I'm the only Latina dean. There's also a Latina colleague who's Director of the School of Journalism in Arizona, Jessica Retis. She's awesome, so I just wanted to add that. The Newmark J school is one of the great journalism schools in the nation. It is, as you know, part of CUNY, a great institution of social mobility. It's public. We are more affordable than most J schools. We have a strong reputation as a leader in journalism education, and we are one of the most diverse forward-looking J schools out there.

I think we've injected more talent of color into the newsrooms than probably any other J school. Our MA prepares journalists to succeed in the industry as is, but we also work very hard to prepare them to be agents of change because the industry as you know, is going through a lot of challenges. We believe that it's a great opportunity to bring about change in the industry. We have unique programs, the first fully bilingual Spanish-English journalism master's program that I created in 2016, an engagement journalism MA, which is the only one in the country. We have an excellent leadership entrepreneurial program.

Of course, what makes the Newmark J school extraordinary, and you know that because a lot of our alumni work with you at the [unintelligible 00:14:54] radio is the same thing that makes New York City so extraordinary and it's its people. It's a really extraordinary community, and I consider myself one of the luckiest people on the planet. I'm very honored to have this job and very excited.

Brian Lehrer: You want to talk for a minute about what engagement journalism is?

Graciela Mochkofsky: The idea with this program that Carrie Brown leads in our school is that traditional journalism has done things wrong in a very fundamental way, which is that the news agenda has been set by the newsrooms and by the journalists, and not by the communities that the news are talking about. It's a way to recenter the public in journalism. It's a way to recenter the public mission of journalism as the center of the conversation on news, just where it belongs, and a way of giving the people we cover, we write about, we talk about, an agency that sometimes was taken away from them.

As you can imagine, it connects really directly and closely with the lack of trust that we see. We see one of the challenges that the news media is suffering, not just here, but everywhere in the world, is that there's record levels of public mistrust. We see increasingly people don't trust the news that has to do with a lot of factors, including political polarization, authoritarianism that is on the rise, the disinformation, the epidemic, and other things, the lack of diversity in the newsrooms, but it also has to do with some old journalistic paradigms that we think need to be questioned, and that there's an increasing demand by the public and by our students and by young journalists to review.

We have a specific program that teaches that, but we also have that philosophy-- [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: That mindset in general.

Graciela Mochkofsky: Exactly, right.

Brian Lehrer: We will leave it there. That is such important work. Congratulations again on becoming dean and good luck with that important mission. I have no doubt that we'll continue to hire a lot of people at WNYC out of the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY. Graciela Mochkofsky, the new dean there, contributing writer for The New Yorker, and author of the new book, Prophet of the Andes: An Unlikely Journey to the Promised land. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Graciela Mochkofsky: Gracias.

 

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