A Beacon in Bariloche: The Bottom of the World

Go far enough south, past Buenos Aires, past Patagonia, past the edge of the known Jewish world — and you’ll find a mezuzah. Bariloche, Argentina sits roughly 1,000 miles from the country’s capital of Buenos Aires, inside a national park so remote that importing kosher meat requires a government permit.

“The next-nearest Chabad House is a 20-hour drive away. To the south, there’s nothing until Antarctica,” says Rabbi Boaz Klein. Along with his wife Shifra and seven children, Rabbi Klein has been the Chabad representative in Bariloche since 2009. He means that literally — sometimes, his work extends all the way to the ice. He has handled calls from Antarctic cruise ships, including one case where an elderly Jewish man passed away mid-voyage and Rabbi Klein had to manage the arrangements from thousands of miles away.

That’s life at the bottom of the world. Seventeen years after arriving, the Kleins are still there — running the southernmost Chabad House on earth, serving an estimated 35,000 Jewish travelers a year, in a city that feels more like Switzerland than South America, surrounded by glaciers, national parks, and the ghosts of a very different kind of history.

Bariloche was founded by German settlers and became, after World War II, one of the most notorious refuges for Nazi war criminals fleeing Europe. The shadow of that past still hangs over the city’s architecture, its street names, and its culture. And sometimes, in the most unexpected corners of that history, Rabbi Klein finds what he came for. About a year ago, he met Hans Steinberg, a Holocaust survivor who had been sent to a church at the age of five, which later relocated from Germany to Norway, and eventually to Argentina. Rabbi Klein reached him just three months before his 100th birthday. It was the first time in his life that Steinberg had ever put on tefillin. “What we learned from the Nazis is that no matter what you do, Judaism never leaves your blood,” Steinberg said. “It’s in your blood. That’s exactly why you came all the way here — even though I haven’t lived as a Jew for more than 90 years.”

The travelers who find their way to Chabad’s door are often in a similar state of need — not just spiritually, but practically. Many arrive gearing up for weeks on the Patagonian trail without a kosher meal in sight. “Seventeen years ago, maybe five percent of Israeli backpackers kept kosher,” Rabbi Klein says. “Now I believe it’s more than fifty percent.” For many of them, the Chabad House in Bariloche is a lifeline — a place to eat, recover, and remember who they are.

They now run a Hebrew school and a kindergarten for the small number of Jewish families in the area. They have seven children of their own, including a set of quadruplets — all of whom have grown up as part of the operation, pitching in wherever they’re needed.

“Wherever a Chabad representative is sent, the Rebbe is with them,” says Rabbi Klein. “I know this, even though Bariloche is near nothing, in the middle of nothing.” For thousands of Jewish tourists every year, that nothing has become somewhere.