The Jews of Iquitos, Peru, have undergone a rebirth and many have moved to Israel. A service at a synagogue in Iquitos.

By SIMON ROMERO


IQUITOS, Peru - If Ronald Reategui Levy someday finds that he is the last Jew of Iquitos, it may well be of his own doing.

His dream is to persuade the descendants of Sephardic merchants who settled in this remote corner of the Amazon basin more than a century ago to reaffirm their ties to Judaism and emigrate to Israel.

“It is getting very lonely here, said Mr. Reategui Levy, 52, an inspector at Peru’s national oil company, referring to the more than 400 descendants of Jewish pioneers who have formally converted to Judaism this decade, including about 160 members of his immediate and extended family. Nearly all of them now live in Israel.

Until recently, such a rebirth of Judaism here seemed unlikely. The history of Jews in Iquitos, dating from the late-19th-century rubber boom that transformed this far-flung Amazonian outpost into a once thriving city, was almost forgotten.

But Mr. Reategui Levy and a handful of others began organizing the descendants of dozens of Jews.

The rubber trade collapsed, and fortunes here and upriver in the Brazilian city of Manaus vanished. Some Jewish immigrants returned home, leaving behind descendants who clung to a belief that they were Jews.

“It was astounding to discover that in Iquitos there existed this group of people who were desperate to reconnect to their roots and re-establish ties to the broader Jewish world, said Lorry Salcedo Mitrani, the director of a new documentary, “The Fire Within, about the Jews of the Peruvian Amazon.

Still, the existence of the Jews of Iquitos posed some philosophical challenges to some Jews elsewhere. Since nearly all the Jews who originally settled here were men, their descendants could not attest to having Jewish mothers, ruling them out as being Jewish according to strict interpretations of Jewish law.

Moreover, the Jewish community of about 3,000 people in Lima, the capital, largely preferred to ignore the Jews of Iquitos, some scholars say, in part because of the thorny issues that the Jews here posed about race and origins. This is, after all, a country where a small light-skinned elite still wields considerable economic and political power - and Lima’s Jews are often seen as an elite within that elite.

“The notion of a Jew who looks like an Indian and lives in a poor house in a small city in the middle of the jungle is, at best, an exotic footnote to the official history of Peru’s Jewry as Lima sees it, said Ariel Segal, a Venezuelan- born Israeli historian who studied the community here.

Finally, the Jews here persuaded Guillermo Bronstein, the chief rabbi of Lima’s largest Ashkenazi synagogue, to oversee two large conversions, easing the way for hundreds to move to Israel.

Mr. Reategui Levy moved in 2005 with his wife and six children to Israel. But he said he had trouble adjusting to Israeli life. So Mr. Reategui Levy moved back, alone. Something keeps Mr. Reategui Levy here in Iquitos.

“My family, my heart and soul, all that I hold dear are in Israel, he said. “Maybe I am back here for a reason.