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Watch or Hear: Baron de Hirsch, the Godfather of Jewish Settlers in the New World

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Presented by Merrie Blocker, creator of the  baronhirschcommunity.org  blog.

Just click on this link :

https://www.habermaninstitute.org/podcast-archive/2026/4/17/baron-de-hirsch-the-godfather-of-jewish-settlers-in-the-new-world

This lecture will take you into the remarkable stories of the Bronfman and Grossinger families, along with hundreds of thousands of other Jewish immigrants, who got their starts thanks to the billions of dollars Baron Maurice de Hirsch dedicated to giving “a portion of my companions in faith the possibility of finding a new existence.”

From the pampas of Argentina to the rolling hills of southern Brazil, across the United States, and onto the windblown prairies of Canada, his generosity opened doors and transformed countless lives.

His philanthropy founded the New World’s second largest Jewish community in Argentina, sparked multibillion dollar fortunes in Brazil, introduced the first bathroom showers and the first farmers’ credit unions to the United States, helped Saskatchewan and Alberta avoid annexation by the United States, and played a key role in the development of the Jewish Catskills.

Merrie Blocker is a retired Foreign Service Officer having served in Latin America, Romania, and Central and Southern Asia, including serving as Director of the U.S. Cultural Center in Buenos Aires and Public Affairs Officer in Porto Alegre, Brazil.

In Argentina and Brazil, Merrie learned of the Jewish agricultural colonies sponsored by Baron Maurice de Hirsch. Then while translating On a Clear April Morning, an autographical novel by an immigrant to a Brazilian colony, she began to research the impact throughout the Americas of the Baron’s philanthropy on the lives of hundreds of thousands of Jewish immigrants.

Merrie holds a B.A. in American Studies from Reed College and an MFA in Museum Administration from Syracuse University. She lives in Silver Spring, Maryland, with her husband, architect Ricardo Merlo, and their golden doodle, Rusty. They have three wonderful children and four marvelous grandchildren.

BARON HIRSCH FUND (Activities in the US) ARCHIVES ONLINE

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The Baron Hirsch Fund’s documents held by the Center for Jewish History in New York are now all online at https://archives.cjh.org/repositories/3/resources/18299

This is a fantastic group of documents for anyone wanting to know more about the founding of the colonies in the United States and life on those colonies.

Wishing you all some good reading. Merrie Blocker

Baron Hirsch, An Amazing New Biography

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Mathias Lehmann, professor of Jewish History at the University of California, Irvine has just published The Baron: Maurice de Hirsch and the Jewish Nineteenth Century. a biography of Baron Hirsch that fills a major gap, the lack of biographies of the Baron in English. 1

And Lehmann also provides us an eyewitness view of so much of Baron Hirsch’s life, based on Lehmann’s extensive archival research in Austria, Belgium, England, France, Israel, Turkey, and the United States.

The Embankment, Ostend, Belgium 1890s , the resort to which Baron Hirsch was summoned by King Leopold II, Library of Congress.

Readers will enjoy this very readable and delightfully detailed text that describes human beings, not just historical figures. We are able to see the building of transcontinental railroads and the formation of huge refugee projects from the details of the daily activities that led to these achievements, as exemplified by the book’s first paragraph ” At seven o’clock one summer morning in August 1895, Maurice de Hirsch, accompanied by his twenty-nine-year-old son Lucien, set out from Boitsfort, on the outskirts of Brussels, to catch the express train to the Belgian seaside resort of Ostend. The reason for that morning’s journey was a summons by King Leopold II, who was eager to convince the prominent Jewish banker and businessman to invest in the construction of a new railroad in the Belgian Congo.” 2

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  1. Other biographies include Grunwald, Kurt, Turkenhirsch: Study of Baron Maurice De Hirsch, 1966; Frischer, Dominique, El Moises de las Americas: Vida Y Obra Del Baron De Hirsch (trans from French), 2004; Lee, Samuel,  Moses of the New World: The Work of Baron Hirsch (1970); Rozenblum, Serge-Allian Le Baron De Hirsch: Un Financier Au Service De L’humanite, 2006 [↩]
  2. Lehmann, Mathias (2022). The Baron: Maurice de Hirsch and the Jewish Nineteenth Century, Stanford: Stanford University Press, p. 19. [↩]

Baron Hirsch World Wide Genealogical and Historical Archives

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For searching family members in the United States and Canada note:

Online searching is available for Baron Hirsch related genealogical records available through the Center for Jewish History in New York. See this video for instructions. Some complete records are online, and when only a reference to a record is on online you can request the full document from the Center via email at inquiries@cjh.org

SEE A LIST OF WORLDWIDE ARCHIVES BELOW.

Baron Maurice de Hirsch

More Archives

In addition, the genealogical and historical archives described below (alphabetized by city) contain reports and correspondence relating to Baron Hirsch-funded Jewish farming projects and individual immigrants who received aid from the Baron Hirsch charitable organizations. These archives are scattered around the world. Some of the holdings have been uploaded digitally – see the links below – but most are only available on-site.

For texts in French, Spanish and Portuguese I suggest copy-pasting into google translate. It really works.

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Merrie Blocker, Creator

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I, Merrie Blocker, am the creator of the baronhirschcommunity.org . Relating and finding stories of Jewish Farmers in the New World, and their descendants worldwide, is the purpose of this site.

I am a retired U.S. foreign service officer. You can find my resume here. My grandfather grew up on a Baron Hirsch- supported chicken farm in northwestern Connecticut, USA. But I only learned that recently when I began to research Baron Hirsch’s support for Jewish farmers throughout the Americas.

I also translated to English the first work to feature the Jewish community in Brazil as subject matter. It is On a Clear April Morning, an autobiographical novel by Marcos Iolovitch. In this novel, he relates growing up as a Ukrainian immigrant to the Quatro Irmãos farming colony in southern Brazil. Quatro Irmãos was one of many colonies supported by Baron Hirsch’s donations.

I hope you will send us your ideas to make this a richer online depository.