An Address in the Amazon

Guests at the Raichmans’ Shabbat table in Manaus, Brazil think they’re eating chicken schnitzel. It’s pirarucu — a massive Amazonian fish, served kosher in a city reachable only by plane or boat, 1,500 kilometers up the Amazon from the Atlantic.

Manaus is the capital of the Brazilian state of Amazonas, a sprawling city of over two million built where two rivers — the Rio Negro and the Solimões — meet to become the Amazon. There is only one connecting road that leads to the Venezuelan border — so Manaus is practically unreachable by car from the rest of Brazil. There are no sidewalks; it’s too hot for anyone to walk. The coldest it gets is around 80 degrees Fahrenheit, and there is no winter, only a rainy season and a dry one. When you call an electrician or a plumber, you learn the local meaning of “mañana.” “It doesn’t mean tomorrow,” Rabbi Raichman says. “It means sometime in the next several days.”

Rabbi Arieh and Dvorah Lea Raichman arrived in 2009 with a two-month-old son. Both have roots in South America — his father is from Argentina, his mother from Brazil; her parents direct Chabad of Belém, the gateway city to the Amazon.

Jewish history in the Amazon dates to the nineteenth-century rubber boom, when Moroccan traders navigated the river system selling goods to remote outposts. In 1910, Rabbi Shalom Muyal, a Moroccan rabbi who had come upriver to perform circumcisions among the Jewish settlers, died of yellow fever and was buried in the municipal cemetery. Non-Jews in Manaus came to revere him as a saint, making pilgrimages to his grave. For the ninety-nine years between Muyal’s death and the Raichmans’ arrival, the community maintained its traditions — an effort Raichman credits to Isaac Dahan, who served as its lay spiritual leader for more than three decades.

Today, around 250 Jews live in Manaus, some descended from those original Moroccan families, the rest drawn by opportunity over the years. The Raichmans serve them all — plus Jews scattered across four neighboring states, including some near the Venezuelan border.

Nearly everything kosher arrives by plane from Belém, where Dvorah Lea’s parents run the local Chabad — making the supply chain a family operation. Rabbi Raichman still occasionally milks cows himself for kosher dairy. They run a small kosher store and host Shabbat meals for locals and visitors. Chabad also offers Torah classes, children’s programming, a Shabbat minyan now running for nearly three years.

But not long ago, the Raichmans counted the people at their Shabbat table — nine people, all locals, eight of whom had never set foot in a synagogue before the Raichmans came. “That’s when you know your presence is needed,” he says. “We find purpose in this every single day.”