Soap Operas of Argentina Make Israelis Swoon

Alicia Slimovich, a recently arrived immigrant from Argentina, remembers the day that Israel suddenly felt closer to home.

Slimovich was trying to talk to a maintenance man painting the dormitory of the resettlement center where she lives in this beachside town. It turned out the young Israeli spoke Spanish. But not just any Spanish. He spoke Porteno: the jaunty, Italian-inflected dialect spawned in the tango halls and waterfront tenements of Buenos Aires a century ago. And he had never been near Argentina.

“He told me he learned Spanish from watching the soap operas on television,” Slimovich said wonderingly. “All these kids, they watch all day and they have just picked up the language on their own.”

Like Slimovich and her husband, Sergio, the thousands of Jews who came to Israel to escape Argentina’s economic crisis knew they were coming to a country with a sizable, well-integrated population of Argentine descent. But they didn’t necessarily realize they were part of a friendly invasion.

Israel has gone wild over the Spanish language, Latin American culture and, above all, Argentine soap operas. For Israelis, who are accustomed to living with a gun within reach and enemies within sight, it’s a blissfully frivolous obsession, a respite from suicide bombings, missile attacks, tense negotiations with the Palestinian Authority and other life-and-death matters.

Israelis can’t get enough of Spanish-language soap operas, known as telenovelas. Two cable channels broadcast about 30 shows a day, mostly Argentine productions with Hebrew subtitles. Children’s summer camps offer telenovela themes that allow the kids to put on their own shows.

Adoring Israeli teenagers mob visiting South American stars such as Natalia Oreiro, a red-haired Uruguayan pop singer who is not exactly a household name outside South America’s Southern Cone region. The wife of Israel’s foreign minister recently traveled to Buenos Aires to tape a cameo on “The Rebels,” a show produced by an Israeli company. Enrollment in Spanish classes has increased tenfold in the last three years.

“It’s really been a revolution,” said Yair Dori, the Argentine-born Israeli television impresario who is the driving force behind the telenovela boom. “It’s now part of the culture, the national personality.”

Not everyone is overjoyed, however. The Israeli parliament, or Knesset, has held hearings in response to fears that the programs are too steamy and explicit for the children who are die-hard fans. Well-read Spanish-speakers wince at the idea that a commercial, less-than-sophisticated genre has become the vehicle for spreading the language of Cervantes.

“The shows are really of a pretty low level,” said Abel Dykler, an immigrant from Uruguay who owns a Spanish-language bookshop in Tel Aviv. He added, with a somewhat sheepish grin, that the effect on business has nonetheless been good: “It sure has helped economically.”

Dykler said the Israeli appetite for Spanish and Latin culture has grown steadily since he opened Libros en Espanol (Books in Spanish) 21 years ago. Half-hidden at the end of a walkway off Tel Aviv’s Allenby Street, the store is a narrow rectangle pleasantly crammed with books on shelves and tables that leave little room to maneuver.

The bespectacled Dykler handles books with gentle reverence as he attends to a steady stream of customers. Many are teenagers and young adults interested in South America, a preferred destination for the Israeli ritual of taking a long backpacking trip after completing military service.

“I love to see the kids speaking to each other in Spanish,” he said. “It’s really become popular.”

Chances are they learned from a TV program imported or produced by Dori, a 56-year-old television magnate who left Argentina when he was 19 but still speaks old-school Porteno.

Argentina has one of the biggest Jewish populations outside Israel, mainly rooted in immigration from Eastern Europe and Russia that began more than a century ago. The community was estimated at its peak at a quarter of a million.

Since the 1960s, there have been periodic waves of Argentine-Jewish immigration to Israel fed by economic turmoil and military coups.

Dori came in 1966 for ideological reasons: He was active in a Zionist movement in Argentina and wanted to do his part for the Jewish state. He joined the military, rose to the rank of paratroop captain and ended up a war hero. He lost an arm and an eye in combat during the 1967 Middle East War and endured captivity in an Egyptian prisoner-of-war camp.

Although Israel’s polyglot society has experienced occasional tensions as it absorbs new influxes, or aliyahs, from places such as Russia and Ethiopia, Argentines have been consistently well received, Dori said. Argentine immigrants tend to be well educated and middle-class; their national personality clicks with Israelis, who see them as warm and good-humored, he said.

“I have the sense that we fulfilled the expectations of the local people,” he said. “The Argentine attitude has the best of the European and the South Americans, very friendly but also respectful in their manners.... An Argentine is likely to let somebody else get off the elevator first. The Argentines have elements of both the Sephardic and the Ashkenazi. That’s helped us to be accepted.”

Dori got his start in the 1970s organizing performances by folk singers such as Mercedes Sosa, tango dancers and others. As the Latin American telenovela genre expanded, he began importing shows.

The introduction of cable TV in the 1990s kick-started his business, which really took off in 1999 with the creation of two channels, Viva and Viva Platinum.

“There’s a necessity to get away from the daily news with all its tragedy and pain,” Dori said.

His company, Dori Group, employs 600 people and produces four of its own programs, two in Israel and two in Argentina. The newest projects in Israel feature shows in Hebrew and a series about an Orthodox Jewish family, Dori said.

The presence of Argentine culture has only grown here since Argentina’s economic meltdown in 2001. More than 30,000 Argentines have immigrated to Israel in the last three years, according to Israel’s Ministry of Immigrant Absorption.

The Slimoviches in Raanana are a representative example. Sergio, a pediatrician, and Alicia, a photographer, loved Buenos Aires, where they had raised a family. They were proud of their Jewish culture and heritage but not especially religious, and they had never been to Israel.

Yet the trauma of Argentina’s crisis shattered their finances and forced them to think about starting over somewhere else. The prospect of facing the dangers of terrorism and war in the Middle East were daunting; on the other hand, the Slimoviches and just about everyone they knew had been victims of a wave of violent crime in Argentina.

The Israeli government offered a generous program of resettlement, complete with intensive language classes, lodging in a resettlement center and job-placement help. Today, the Slimoviches’ favorite cafe in Raanana fills with old friends who also left Buenos Aires in search of a new home: a pediatrician, an anesthesiologist, a surgeon.

“The aid has been very good,” Sergio said. “We are very grateful. It’s an uncertain future, but I hope this is a place where you can work and your work has value. In Argentina, it was impossible.”

*

Times Paris Bureau chief Rotella was recently on assignment in Raanana.