The community was founded in 1966 by a local man of Trujillo named Segundo Villanueva, who began studying Judaism at the age of twelve in 1939, while living in the city of Cajamarca. Villanueva founded a religious group called Israel de Dios ("Israel of God") that followed Jewish practices as described in the Hebrew Bible. In 1967, Villanueva took 19 families of his movement to settle in the Peruvian Amazon near Iquitos, forming a settlement called Hebrón.