The association was established by Baron Maurice de Hirsch, a Jewish-French industrialist who amassed a fortune building railroads in Russia.
In August 1889, 824 Jewish immigrants arrived from Russia on the steamer "Weser", and settled in the Moïseville colony (today the town of Moisés Ville) in the province of Santa Fe.
The colonists also began to pool their resources to buy seeds, and in Basavilbaso in 1900 they founded the Sociedad Agricola Israelita, the first cooperative in Latin America.
[1] Writing in South American Explorer magazine in 1978, author David Schneider states: In less than 80 years, thousands of Jews crossed an ocean, settled on the Argentine pampa, reared children, prospered, and moved on, leaving behind weathered and empty synagogues, boarded-up schools, closed libraries.
The Jewish Gauchos of the Pampas, by Alberto Gerchunoff, is a series of vignettes about shtetl life in Argentina first published in 1910 and now available in English.