Iton Gadol noted the 179th anniversary of B’nai B’rith International’s founding.

Read in Iton Gadol (in Spanish).

On October 13, 1843, Henry Jones and 11 other German Jewish immigrants gathered at the Sinsheimer Café, on the Lower East Side of New York, to face what Isaac Rosenbourg called ‘the deplorable condition of the Jews in this, our new country of adoption,’, and founded the B’nai Brith (children of the pact), mostly immigrants from Germany, Poland, Bohemia and Austria, mostly with scarce resources who spoke German and, of course, had not yet adapted to the living conditions of the United States.

His first decision regarding the aid they would provide was to establish an allowance so that the widows of their members could face the burial expenses and a monthly subsidy for them as well as for their children, assuring the men of teaching a trade.

The institution prospered and in 1851 built the Covenant Hall in New York City, it was built in New York as the first center of the Jewish community in the United States; and a year later it established the Maimonides library, the first Jewish library in the country, initiating a task that made it an international Jewish organization committed to the security and continuity of the Jewish People and the State of Israel principles of humanity.

The mission of the B’nai B’rith is to unite the Jews and enhance their identity through the strengthening of family life and the education of youth, services for the elderly and the defense of Jews around the world, founding hospitals, homes for orphan children, establishing homes for the elderly, carrying out aid campaigns in the event of natural disasters, founded libraries, created anti-hate and

His international activity began in 1870, although two years earlier he carried out his first philanthropic project outside the United States, a fundraising campaign aimed at helping the Jews of Eretz Israel (land of Israel) victims of a cholera epidemic.

Currently it is made up of about 180,000 members who are active in subsidiaries that have their headquarters in more than 50 countries, including Argentina, where it began its activity in 1930, being a kind of “lawyer” of the Jewish people in the world, since according to the needs of current times, in an organization at the service of the Jewish people and all humanity, because its flexibility allowed it any religious or political tendency, sustaining the freedom of thought and expression of each of its members.

B’nai B’rith International is one of the NGOs recognized by the United Nations, an international entity in which to participate as an observer.

Source: the websites of the subsidiaries of Denver, Panama and Argentina of the B’nai B’rith.