For globetrotter Moshe Klein, the Jewish kehillah in Caracas was a shot of southern comfort

“No, really, why are you even here?” That’s a question that would put off most tourists, but not globetrotter Moshe Klein, who’s made it his mission to document fading Jewish communities. While most of the fellow tribesmen he’s encountered in far-flung places are happy to see a Jewish traveler, the people he met on a recent trip to Venezuela couldn’t understand why he’d even come there at all

While Moshe Klein has visited nearly 100 countries in the years since he’s decided to document old Jewish kehillos, Venezuela hadn’t even been on his bucket list. But when his friend Dov Bleich suggested they take a trip together to a place that was out of the ordinary and truly unique, Klein was all in. Still, Bleich’s suggestion that they travel to North Korea left him with mixed feelings. Instead, Klein proposed Venezuela, a country that had never been on his radar.

“It was definitely closer than North Korea,” says Klein, “and while usually I know about the places I’m going to, I was happy to go someplace without a lot of prior knowledge and learn as I traveled.”

The fact that Venezuela has the highest Do Not Travel advisory level, due to severe risks to Americans including wrongful detention, torture in detention, terrorism, kidnapping, arbitrary enforcement of local laws, crime, civil unrest, poor health infrastructure, and unavailability of American citizen services, didn’t seem to bother him.

Flight Risk?

Looking at the map, booking a flight from New York to Venezuela, on the northern tip of South America, doesn’t seem like it would be particularly complicated, but Klein quickly discovered that with ongoing political instability, there were, in fact, no direct options.  And while Conviasa, Venezuela’s national carrier, does offer international routes, Klein had zero interest in going to Tehran, Istanbul, or Moscow to catch one of those flights and turning a 2,000-mile flight into a 10,000-mile expedition.

“I wasn’t traveling halfway around the world to get someplace that’s four hours away,” notes Klein. Instead, he booked a JetBlue ticket to Curacao, a much more direct route, even though it did involve a nearly 24-hour-long stopover on the Dutch Caribbean island. Taking advantage of the opportunity, Klein took a quick visit to Curacao’s small Jewish community, whose most salient moment came when a local resident reprimanded him in Hebrew for looking too Jewish.

“He told me, ‘Are you crazy? Do you think this is Brooklyn, or Bnei Brak? You don’t know which Arab can come out of nowhere and attack you,’” Klein relates.

The incident left Klein on edge, and that feeling of uneasiness only grew the next day after he and his friend landed in the Venezuelan capital of Caracas. He and Bleich hadn’t been seated together during the 45-minute flight, but it was clear that something was not quite right when they met up once again in Simón Bolívar International Airport and headed toward immigration.

“Dov was white as a sheet,” says Klein. “I asked him what happened and he told me that the person seated next to him on the flight said that the second he got to Caracas, he would be taken into a room and interrogated, and that all his money would be taken away. He told him that maybe if they were nice, they might leave him a few dollars.”

Thankfully, the line through immigration went smoothly and in no time at all, Klein and Bleich met up with the driver they had hired and were heading out of the airport in his SUV, which happened to be bulletproof. That extra security measure is common in older cars, with bulletproof vehicles, and even clothing, having become increasingly popular a little over a decade ago, when violent crime became rampant on the streets of Venezuela.

While Venezuela’s security situation has vastly improved, why would Klein want to travel to a place that has earned the State Department’s most dire travel classification, where kidnapping and the arrest and detention of US citizens without due process or fair trial guarantees is a real risk, and where US travelers are advised to prepare a will, hire private security, and not to rely on consular services in case of emergency?

Klein doesn’t seem surprised or flustered by the question, explaining that he has thousands of travel miles under his belt, and that he always does his homework before traveling to any country.

“Of course you have to make sure it’s safe, but once I do, then I go there to experience things that might be different than how they’re portrayed in the media, and see how people really live,” says Klein.  “Besides, Caracas is actually very safe — despite the renewed travel advisory, the kidnappings are long gone, and the wealthy people don’t feel the need to buy bulletproof cars anymore.”

While the State Department guidelines are obviously important, Klein notes that certain European countries that aren’t classified as security risks still pose significant safety problems.

“In Western Europe, you get hate stares when you walk around looking openly Jewish, which wasn’t the case when I was in Venezuela,” observes Klein. “There are places in Europe where even the natives aren’t safe, yet the State Department hasn’t issued any travel advisories there.”