Argentina – Argentinean Rabbi Sergio Bergman won a seat on the Buenos Aires municipal legislature.
Subscribe to our Daily Roundup Email
The rabbi lead the vote tally with 45 percent of the votes, garnering triple the number of votes of the candidate who came in second place, Juan Cabandié of the Victory Front Party, who won 14 percent of the vote. .
Bergman, the senior rabbi of the traditional Congregacion Israelita Argentina, is the founder of Active Memory, a group that demonstrated every Monday for a decade in front of Argentina’s Supreme Court seeking justice for the victims of the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish center.
Bergman was tapped by the city’s incumbent mayor, Mauricio Macri, to lead his PRO Party’s list for the municipal legislature. As the top candidate on the center-right party’s slate the rabbi obtained almost half of the votes, in a more than 10-candidate election of Buenos Aires Argentina´s capital, with a population of about 13 million and a budget of $5.9 billion.
Bergman told JTA that he got involved in politics because Argentine society is “in a deep crisis of values,” adding that “I believe that Torah can also be taught in the legislature.” He dismissed the notion that his candidacy could put the Jewish community at risk. “If the society knows us better, the level of anti-Semitism will become lower,” Bergman said. “I have many non-Jewish voters. The only doubt today is if Jews will vote for me.”
Isn’t harav Eckshtein the rav in Argentina already?
He certainly won by a huge majority. To me that indicates that in the area he was running in, doesn’t have much of a problem with anti-semitism. It is obvious that he made no secret of the fact that he was a rabbi during the election campaign.