How Should One Pray South of the Equator?

David Pisanté was among a group of immigrants from Istanbul and elsewhere in the Ottoman Empire who settled in Argentina around the turn of the twentieth century. Writing from an agricultural colony near Rosario financed by the Jewish Colonization Association, Pisanté wrote a letter to Ḥayim Naḥmias, the chief rabbi of the Ottoman Empire, inquiring about the appropriate phrasing for those in the Southern Hemisphere of a piece of the daily liturgy that refers to the seasons. Pisanté’s letter reflects the reluctance of many Sephardic émigrés to give up their customs and adopt the customs of other Jewish communities already established in Argentina, as a well as a desire to maintain continuity with their places of origin.