Will Argentina's Jews Recover From The Junta? The reign of terror for Argentinian Jews ended in 1983 with the over- throw of the military regime. But the threat of assimilation is now greater than ever. And debate still rages whether Jews did everything possible to resist the horrors. The Nightmare Continues AVIVA CANTOR Special to The Jewish News rgentina's night of ter- ror and carnage is over at last — but the night- mare goes on. The dawn of democracy has brought no end to the agony of the rela- tives of the "desaparecidos," the 9,300 (documented) to 30,000 (estimated) individ- uals, mainly youths, devoured by the junta during its 1976- 83 reign of terror. These "disappeared per- sons" were pulled from their beds at gunpoint in the dead of night, snatched off the streets into unmarked cars, hauled off from their offices. Never heard from again, they have no graves, not even un- marked ones.. The Jewish community, traumatized by this reign of terror, now seeks, like the ma- jority of Argentinians, to put the past behind it, fearing that disinterring the human rights atrocities might endan- ger the fragile democratic re- 48 Friday, August 22, 1986 gime of Ffresident Raul Alfon- sin. The community, however, is still rent by bitter conflict over what it did and did not do for the victims of the ter- ror, in particular, the Jewish desaparecidos. While these charges and counter-charges have come in- to the open in Argentina since the reinstitution of democ- racy in that country, informa- tion regarding the heroic res- cue of Jews during the reign of terror via an "underground railroad" organized by Israe- lis stationed in Argentina has not been made public. An estimated 10 percent of the desaparacidos were Jews — a proportion higher than the Jews' one-and-a-quarter percent in the population. They included what the jun- ta called "ideological crimi- nals," people in - psychology, the social sciences, journal- ism, teaching — and over 100 children of desaparecidos. En- tire chapters and all the local emissaries of Hashomer Hat- zair, the Socialist Zionist youth movement, disap- THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS peared. Most of the counsel- ors and almost the entire youth movement in Cordoba disappeared. Since the reign of terror began in 1976, a group of women has been marching every Thursday in front of the Presidential Palace in Buenos Aires to demand an account- ing on the fate of their disap- peared children. They are known as the "Madres," the Mothers of the Plaza de Maya Renee Epelbaum, a widow in her 60's, is one of their leaders. Her three children are among the desaparecidos; none have ever been heard from or about since their ab- duction. Luis, who had been a medical student concerned about his country's poor, was kidnapped in August 1977 at the age of 25. The younger children — Claudio (then 23), a poet and musician who was studying law to be able to de- fend prisoners of conscience, and Lila (then 25) — were kid- napped three months later from Uruguay. Their mother had sent them there to try to ensure their .safety. She is one of six mothers and one grandmother appear- ing in a recently released documentary on "Las Mad- res: the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo." The film was pro- duced and directed by Susana Munoz, an Argentine-born Jew who was active in a Zionist youth movement, and lived in Israel from 1972-79, and Lourdes Portillo. Epelbaum said, in an inter- view during a recent visit to New York in connection with the film, that Jewish desa- parecidos "were not kidnap- ped as Jews, but it helped. The police were more suspi- cious of Jews. For them, every Jew must be a Communist." The junta, she continued, was "deeply anti-Semitic." Jews in prison received three or four times the measure of torture as non-Jews. This has been substantiated by Am- nesty International, former prisoner Jacobo Timerman, and, most recently, by Nobel Peace Prize winner Adolfo Perez Esquivel, who was himself imprisoned and tor- tured for 14 months. Epelbaum charged that the DAIA, the representative body of Argentine Jewry, did not intervene with the authorities on behalf of Jewish desaparecidos and prisoners — a charge the DAIA emphatically denied in its 1984 document on the subject. Rabbi Marshall Meyer, who served until recently as spiritual leader of Congrega- tion Beth-El of Buenos Aires, was a founding member of the Permanent Assembly for Human Rights, and visited prisoners in jail. In a recent interview in New York, where he now serves as rabbi of Con- gregation B'nai Jeshuran, he criticized the DAIA for not speaking out forcefully on human rights atrocities in general. Both Epelbaum and Meyer charge that the DAIA urged Jewish communities outside the country to keep silent about the horrors. Epelbaum said she was told that World Jewish Congress affiliates did so because. of the WJC policy that they cannot intervene when a local affiliate, in this case the DAIA, opposes it. Meyer also revealed the scope of the unofficial rescue work the Israelis were doing in Argentina during the reign of terror: running a latter-day "underground railroad" to get Jews at risk out of the coun- try. Israel's Ambassador un- til 1980, the late Ram Nirgad, and his staff "worked tireless- ly night and day, and saved hundreds of Jews," he said.