São Paulo Jewish - Half-Day Tour

São Paulo has the second largest Jewish community in Latin America, behind Buenos Aires, capital of Argentina. Of the 110,000 Jews living in Brazil, approximately 60,000 people live in the city of São Paulo.Jewish immigrants came from different countries in Europe and the Middle East and contributed to an intense cultural and political transformation of the city, founding newspapers, libraries, schools, synagogues, charitable associations, profoundly marking São Paulo society with the culture of Judaism

Itinerary

Jewish Immigration Memorial

Located at the first neighborhood where Jewish immigrants settled in São Paulo, this memorial is located in the building of the state’s first synagogue, Kehilat Israel, and brings a little of the Jewish memory through rare objects, documents, photos and multimedia resources.

Higienópolis neighborhood

Former stronghold of the coffee barons and that from the 1920s onwards becomes one of the main points of the Jewish community in São Paulo. This fact drastically changed the neighborhood and synagogues, Hebrew schools and kosher restaurants and bakeries were built on site. Currently the neighborhood has 11 synagogues and 25% of São Paulo’s Jews inhabit this region of the city.

Unibes (Brazilian Israeli Union of Social Welfare)

Founded in 1915, the institution was created from the merger of several groups and organizations working in the areas of social assistance with the Jewish community, with the purpose of helping the thousands of immigrants who arrived in Brazil as a result of the first and second World War.