The first Jews who came to Bolivia were Marranos, some of whom worked in the silver mines in Potosi. Others helped start the city of Santa Cruz. Today there are still some families in the area who have the custom to light candles on Friday night and to sit on the floor when in mourning. There was a small influx of Jews to Bolivia in 1905. Russian Jews, followed by Jews from Argentina, Turkey but not more that a hundred or so. By 1933 there were about 30 Jewish Families.

The first large group of Jews to arrive into Bolivia did so in the early 1930’s, when about 7,500 arrived from Germany. They were followed at the end of the decade, by a group of Polish Jews fleeing their adopted hometown of Shanghai. These immigrants settled in places such as La Paz and Cochabamba. The Circulo Israelita de Bolivia Synagogue is the highest synagogue in the world. It is located in La Paz, and is located at over 12,000 feet above sea level.

German Jewish entrepreneur Mauricio Hochschild was vilified as a ruthless tycoon, but when researchers started sorting through the paperwork decades later, they began to unravel the tale of how he helped Jews flee from persecution in the 1930s.
Hochschild saved many souls from the Holocaust by bringing them to Bolivia and creating jobs for them. During the 1938-1940 immigration wave, Jewish refugees received help from the Mauricio Hochschild who had investments in Bolivia.

He helped get visas for Jewish immigrants from Europe and helped found the Sociedad de Proteccion a los Immigrantes Israelitas. In 1939, Hochschild calculated that he had brought 9,000 Jews to Bolivia. Hochschild paid the Jews’ passage to Bolivia and housed them to begin with after they arrived.

In recent decades, the Jewish community of Bolivia has declined significantly, many of them migrating to other countries such as Israel, the United States and Argentina. Bolivia’s 500 Jews mostly live in the capital, La Paz, where there are two synagogues, but there are smaller communities in Santa Cruz and Cochabamba. In Cochabamba the Associacion Israelita de Cochambamba maintains a synagogue and a cemetery.