By Benjamin Gown, Special to JTNews
Jewish communities everywhere are producing mentsches. This is a story about a Jew from Buenos Aires who, in addition to possessing good ethics, a sense of responsibility, and other mentschadik qualities, is also uncommonly talented and capable, and has potential to positively shape our world. He lives in Belltown and his name is Marcelo Javier Birnbach.
Born the second of three children in 1976 in the Argentine capital, Marcelo had a happy childhood filled with family, sports, school and friends. His older brother Mariano chose his father’s profession of accounting and business while his younger sister Jacqueline chose her mother’s profession of law.
A champion wrestler during his early teens, Marcelo’s room was filled with trophies, including those won at national tournaments. Although he could have wrestled in the Olympics, partly inspired by Argentina’s 1986 World Cup victory, of which he has vivid memories, he switched over to soccer.
He began to play with friends at Hebraica JCC, one of over 30 Jewish community centers in Buenos Aires. These numerous community centers and Jewish country clubs, some of which occupy entire 14-story buildings, reflect Buenos Aires’ tightly knit Jewish community, where the vast majority of Argentina’s approximately 200,000 Jews live.
Marcelo attended a Jewish kindergarten, primary school and technical high school. Upon entering high school at age 15, he decided to specialize in computers.
“I had a Commodore 64 at home and always liked making small games and programs when I was young,” he explains. This life of freedom and family was what his Polish, Romanian, Ukrainian and Russian grandparents had hoped to provide for their families when they fled oppression in their respective countries. Marcelo has shoulder length, straight black hair crowning his dark facial features and thin physique.
Marcelo’s grandparents most surely had not anticipated the difficulties and violence their families would face in their South American home. Jews from Spain, France, Morocco and other regions have been emigrating to Argentina for centuries. It was the tens of thousands of Eastern European Jewish refugees who, after arriving in waves throughout the early 20th century and settling in agricultural colonies, (which they soon abandoned for city life), fully experienced the tension and intolerance of Argentine society.
In 1992, when Marcelo was 16, the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires was bombed. In 1994, when he was 18, the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina, the city’s central Jewish community center, was bombed. A total of 114 people were killed in these attacks, both of which were carried out by suicide bombers and are surrounded in controversy involving the Argentine government and its relationship with Iran.
Marcelo, who remembers helping to remove bodies and rebuild a library, says that Jewish buildings in Buenos Aires now have more walls and security.
“The embassy attack was political: it felt like an attack on Israel,” he says. “But our community, our religion was the target of the AMIA bombing. That felt like an attack on the Jewish soul.”
His grandfather, whose family was killed in Auschwitz, became ill when Marcelo was 19. Until then, his relationship with Judaism had been merely social, but he and his brother had questions about the religion, which they took to a local rabbi for what became weekly meetings. They began to keep kosher, and many of their friends, inspired by the Birnbach brothers’ shift in practice, also became more observant.
Also around this time, Marcelo went to university. He was accepted into the top engineering school in Argentina, where he decided to study software engineering. He worked in a range of software-related jobs, including his own start-up company that installed computers in the cockpits of small planes to make them easier to navigate. The computers were clunky and archaic, and Marcelo’s profits were not great, but he enjoyed seeing “how software can be helpful on a day-to-day basis.”
He was well-positioned when dot-com fever arrived in the late 1990s. After college, he and three friends from his class were hired as software developers and consultants for the South American virtual bank, latinstocks.com. This same group of four friends later started their own consulting company, as well as a few other software start-ups, all of which was “super fun,” Marcelo says.
In 2001, when Microsoft recruiters looking for talent came to South America, Marcelo submitted his resume, though he said he was not particularly interested. He and two partners were interviewed and offered jobs in Redmond. After convincing the software giant to hire the fourth partner, the quartet moved to Seattle.
He arrived on August 21, 2001 and lived in temporary housing in Sammamish, “in the middle of the mountains,” as Marcelo describes it. The move, which his parents supported and agreed was a good opportunity, initially felt like a vacation, and he put 3,000 miles on his car in the first two weeks after arriving.
“I’m a really social person, so I wanted to meet lots of people,” he says. One day, while looking for kosher food online, he exchanged e-mails with David Grashin, the former director of the Va’ad HaRabanim of Greater Seattle, who promptly invited Marcelo for Shabbat dinner and offered his friendship.
“Living in Seattle, I have come to feel that the Jewish community is like a family,” says Marcelo. “It felt like, ‘it doesn’t matter where you are, we’ll support you.’”
This idea of community was soon put to a test. In December 2001, the Argentine economy collapsed after years of increasing recession, which resulted in riots, deaths, widespread poverty and hunger.
As a response, Marcelo and his three expatriate friends launched the Web site and nonprofit organization, porloschicos.com (for the children). Modeling their efforts on those of large-scale charity Web sites and obtaining the sponsorship of big companies such as Coca Cola and Shell, porloschicos.com tallies the number of visits the site receives daily and converts that number to a relative dollar amount which the site’s sponsors donate to a fund. The site then distributes the money in the fund to organizations that provide food for schools and churches serving impoverished youth throughout Argentina. Even today, the site receives over 10,000 visits daily and has fed over 3 million in its six years of operation. Marcelo, who was interviewed on Argentine national television about this volunteer effort, has plans to start masporloschicos — more for the children — in an attempt to involve the help of North America and Europe.
Marcelo says he enjoys the security of his life here, and enjoys working with intelligent people from all over the world at Microsoft.
“When I first arrived, my officemate was a Muslim and we became close,” he says. “I never thought in Argentina that I would have a Muslim friend.”
But Seattle may lose Marcelo before too long: he is motivated by a challenge, and he sees other cities in his future. Seattle may miss Marcelo, but whether it’s New York, Miami or Buenos Aires, any community will be sure to welcome his presence.