Esther Ita Feldman
Esther Ita Feldman was a Brazilian Jewish editor, translator, and community activist best known for her role as a senior editor of the Rio de Janeiro–based weekly magazine Aonde Vamos?. Active in the publication from 1960 until its closure in 1977, she became one of the most influential women in the Brazilian Jewish press of the mid‑20th century.
Her personal testimony was recorded by the Museu da Pessoa in 1988 as part of the "Heranças e Lembranças" project on Jewish immigrants in Brazil.
Early life
Esther Ita Feldman was born on 23 November 1909 in Warsaw, then part of the Russian Partition of Poland.She was born Esther Ita Cukierkorn, the eldest of four children in a Jewish family of modest middle‑class means. Her father, Noach Cukierkorn, was a tobacco wholesaler, and her mother, Rachel Segal, came from the town of Maków, where her family had operated a large department store before relocating to Warsaw.
Feldman attended the Sofia Kalewska School, a progressive Jewish girls’ school in Warsaw known for its high academic standards and diverse faculty. She recalled being two years younger than most classmates and described the school as “inaudibly superior” to later educational experiences in Brazil. Her teachers included Natalia Kaczorowska, a former professor at the University of Zurich, and Leopold Infeld, a physicist who had worked with Albert Einstein.
Feldman’s family spoke Yiddish at home, and she recalled her father reading Hebrew stories to her as a child. She had three brothers: Alexander, Moshe, and Simcha. Moshe later settled in Mandatory Palestine, while the rest of her extended family perished during the Holocaust. She estimated that more than fifty relatives were lost, with only one cousin surviving by fleeing to Russia and later reaching Cyprus.
First period in Israel and return to Poland
In 1924, Feldman’s family emigrated to Mandatory Palestine, settling on Mount Carmel near Haifa. Her grandfather, a devout Orthodox Jew, had purchased land and built homes for several family members. Esther completed her secondary education there at the Hebrew Reali School and later returned to Poland in 1928 with her parents and two uncles. She enrolled at the Wolna Wszechnica Polska, a progressive university in Warsaw, where she studied library science. She also worked briefly in a library, though employment opportunities for Jews were limited.Antisemitism in Poland
Feldman described rising antisemitism in interwar Poland, including university segregation policies and street violence. She recounted incidents such as Jewish students being forced to sit separately in classrooms and her uncle being assaulted in public. Her brother Alexander circumvented restrictive quotas by completing a philosophy degree before transferring to engineering.Marriage and migration to Brazil
In her 1988 oral history recorded by the Museu da Pessoa, Feldman recalled meeting her future husband, the Russian-born artisan and photographer Joseph Feldman, while still living in Poland. She described their introduction as having occurred through mutual acquaintances. Her testimony does not specify the circumstances of her own migration to Brazil, but indicates that she joined Joseph in Rio de Janeiro sometime before the early 1940s, where the couple established their home and raised their family.Further Education in Brazil
In 1936, Esther Ita Feldman completed the second-year bookkeeping course at the Departamento Feminino do Instituto La-Fayette in Rio de Janeiro. The institute was known for training women in commercial and technical fields, and Feldman was listed among the graduates in a published announcement of that year's completion ceremony.Career
Work with ''Aonde Vamos?''
Feldman began working for the weekly magazine Aonde Vamos? in 1960, initially as a translator and contributor. The publication, founded in 1943, was one of the most widely circulated Jewish periodicals in Brazil and served as a major forum for debates on Zionism, Jewish identity, and community affairs.Following the death of longtime editor Aron Neumann in February 1973, Feldman assumed the role of editor‑in‑chief, a position she held for approximately three years. In a letter published in the Jornal do Brasil on 15 January 1976, she emphasized Neumann's central role in shaping the magazine and clarified her own long-standing involvement with the publication.
During her tenure, Feldman worked alongside director Ronald Fucs and later with journalist Isaac Akcelrud, contributing to a period of professionalization and cultural expansion within the magazine.
Feldman served as editor-in-chief of the Jewish magazine Aonde Vamos? from its early years through the 1970s. In a 1976 feature in the Jornal do Brasil, she was described as having accompanied the publication “desde os primeiros tempos” and as the person who defined its editorial objectives. The magazine, founded during World War II with its first issue dated 11 March 1943, was created under restrictive conditions imposed by Brazil’s wartime censorship agency. Its founder, Aron Neumann, acquired the title from a tourism supplement to circumvent registration barriers. Under Feldman’s editorial leadership, the magazine maintained strict advertising policies, refusing ads from firms with ideological positions contrary to Judaism. It aimed to represent Jewish interests, particularly among young Brazilian Jews, and published both original Jewish literature and translated articles from international sources.
Aonde Vamos? ceased publication in 1977.
Cultural and community involvement
Feldman was active in the broader Jewish cultural sphere in Rio de Janeiro. The Museu Judaico do Rio de Janeiro—founded in 1977—preserves extensive documentation of Jewish communal life in the city, including periodicals such as Aonde Vamos? and other materials related to the Jewish press.Personal life
Esther Ita Feldman was married to Joseph Feldman, a Russian-born artisan and photographer who settled in Rio de Janeiro in 1925. Joseph Feldman was known for crafting ritual objects such as hanukiot, and his work is preserved in the Feldman Collection at the Jewish Museum of Rio de Janeiro.The couple had at least two sons, Guili Alexandre Feldman and Eliahu Feldman. A memorial notice published in the Jornal do Brasil confirms Esther Feldman's participation in the unveiling of Joseph Feldman's tombstone at the Cemitério Israelita de Vila Rosali, alongside other family members including Eliahu Feldman and his children.
Esther Ita Feldman was also the mother-in-law of the Israeli viola da gamba player and musicologist Myrna Herzog, who married her son Eliahu Feldman. Herzog later wrote about the Feldman family in her scholarly work, referring to Joseph Feldman as “a passionate instruments collector” who introduced her to rare historical instruments.
Later life and death
After retiring from editorial work, Feldman emigrated to Israel, where she lived in Ra'anana.Esther Ita Feldman died on 7 February 1999 in Ra'anana, Israel. Her death was announced by family members in both Israel and Brazil, including Eliahu, Myrna, Daniel, David, and Michel Feldman, and Aurora, Raphael, Gabriel, and Natan Feldman.