The Library, Center of Social and Cultural Life

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw the founding of several Jewish libraries in Buenos Aires. Some, like the Russian Library, were founded by immigrant intellectuals affiliated with left-wing social and political streams (the Russian Library was torched in 1910 during antiworker repressions). Another important library was the Enrique Heine, founded by the Cultural Commission of the Argentine Jewish Club that used to organize periodic festivals on topics of “Jewish interest,” which included cinema, theater, music, and politics. Offering Yiddish-language books imported from Europe and the United States while also stocking books and periodicals in Spanish, these libraries began to broaden their scope in the 1910s, becoming also cultural and study centers where immigrants could discuss politics, arts, and culture, and host gatherings in Yiddish and Spanish about a variety of topics.