Jacobo Timmerman, a Jew and an Argentine publisher, was jailed, tortured and eventually banished by the military regime. Above, Political prisoners in a Buenos Aires jail demanding immediate release after the overthrow of the junta. Left, A "Madre" — A mother of the Plaza de Mayo — prote'sting in Buenos Aires to know the fate of her disappeared children. `He was involved with every :!ase." Meyer described the opera- Om: when a Jew was kidnap- ed, the next thing the securi- o y forces would do was get a cold of his or her address )ook and seize all her or his riends and acquaintances. \iirgad and his people, there- ;ore, quickly compiled a list of 1 Ames of all the friends and ,:olleagues of a disappeared Serson, who were at grave . isk. "We went from door to loor, from house to house," he .ontinued, "persuading par- nts to let their children go Vith us. They had to leave at i nce." i.i Meyer would not dis- lose the route out of Argen- . a or the immediate coun- y of destination. Dov Schmorak, who took ver Nirgad's job until 1985, did last year that he and the DAIA made secret arrange- ',lents with the government nd security forces who could let certain prisoners go the Israelis would get them ut. The Israelis often went in middle of the night to the lisons, took the released ews to the airport, and got nem out of the country. In her criticism of DAIA, pelbaum said, "When the disappearances began in 1976, the DAIA did nothing — I don't know if they were fearful or simply didn't think it was convenient." She said that she met with DAIA lead- ers and was told they had presented the Minister of In- terior and General Roberto Videla with a list of 90 names of kidnapped young Jews. The generals had promised to respond to the DAIA and when they did, she was told, the DAIA would submit another list. She charged that shortly after Marcos, the son of then- DAIA president Nehemias Resnizky, was kidnapped in July 1977, and released after three days, "the DAIA stop- ped their commitment to this problem." Many people, she said, believed both acts were related. Resnizky has vehemently denied the charge, insisting that the DAIA continued to present lists of disappeared Jews to the government throughout the junta's rule. The DAIA, in an official document dated January 1984 (long after Resnizky's term of office was over), stated that it had "assumed without hesitations the defense of the Jews" whose disappearances were brought to its attention. The DAIA "was the only group that regularly with insistence and energy asked from the public powers an explanation of the situation of its member de- tainees and disappeared," said the DAIA's official English translation of the document. The document stated that the DAIA intervened on be- half of Jewish desaparecidos from the beginning. Rabbi Meyer acknowledged that the DAIA did intervene in specific cases "but not in general." The DAIA, he said, "did not condemn human rights violations. They said life is going on normally, Zionist activities are permit- ted, the schools are open." Epelbaum's Canadian cou- sin, Charles Zaionz, chairman of the Canadian Jewish Con- gress' International Affairs Committee, was actively in- volved in work on behalf of Argentine Jews during the reign of terror. He said in an interview that following Epelbaum's visit to North America in 1978 to rally sup- port for the Madres, CJC of- ficials requested a meeting with the Argentine Ambas- sador. Epelbaum's Canadian cous- in, Charles Zaionz, chairman of the Canadian Jewish Con- gress' International Affairs Committee, was actively in- volved in work on behalf of Argentine Jews during the reign of terror. He said in an interview that following Epelbaum's visit to North America in 1978 to rally sup- port for the Madres, CJC of- ficials requested a meeting with the Aigentine Ambassa- dor. After being kept waiting for over a month, he said, they were shown a govern- ment-made film in which Resnizky and two of his col- leagues — a rabbi and a banker whose names Zaionz did not recall — stated that Jewish life in Argentina was normal. Epelbaum said that when she visited the U.S. in late 1978 and early 1979, she asked leaders of the World Jewish Congress to express concern about the violations of human rights in Argentina. She said she was told that they could not do so because of WJC policy that if the af- filiate in a particular country opposed it, others elsewhere "couldn't say a word." "The junta believed that the Jewish community had influence in the U.S. and Canada, and the world in gen- eral, so they tried to be sup- ported by the DAIA so that nobody, particularly in the U.S. — the 'Jewish lobby' — would say anything against them," Epelbaum said. In response to this criti- cism, Israel Singer, secretary general of the World Jewish Congress, said that WJC president Edgar Bronfman spoke out very forcefully against the junta at the 1981 meeting of the Latin Ameri- can Jewish Congress in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and in inter- views with Argentine news- papers. Singer did acknowl- edge, however, that Jewish communities outside Argen- tina "might have been more vociferous if they (the DATA) had encouraged us." Jewish observers familiar with Argentina have ex- pressed the view that the DAIA may have been moti- vated by fear for the fate of the entire Jewish community in a country which has a long history of anti-Semitism. Epelbaum said that the at- titude of the organized Jew- ish community in Argentina was "very upsetting to me, painful, very sad." It was not only the Jewish community that did not take strong ac- tion on behalf of the junta's victims — "almost everybody was like them" — but, she said, "as a Jew and [in the light ofl the Jewish tradition, we expected a different at- titude." The Madres, Epelbaum among them, are still march- ing in the Plaza de Mayo. "We still haven't gotten the answer as to what happened to most of the children," she said, and all the criminals have not been punished. "We can't act as if nothing hap- pened. For me, the main fac- tor is memory. As a Jew, you must remember the Holo- caust. You must remind peo- ple what happened so it will not be repeated. Memory must be kept so we will never have this kind of nightmare again." Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 1986. A Search For Identity LEONOR BLUM Special to The Jewish. News Argentina's Jewish com- munity is experiencing more freedom and more political success than ever before. And yet there is fear that greater acceptance will eventually lead to the community's total assimilation. The return to democracy in December, 1983 has led to an unprecedented participation of Jews in Argentine political and cultural life. Under the Radical presidency of Raul Alfonsin, who leads a party Continued on Page 68 r.