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Argentine Jews Seek
Synthesis of Identities
AVIVA CANTOR
B
uenos Aires — The
central struggle Ar-
gentine Jews are in-
volved in, says Conservative
Rabbi Baruj Plavnick, is that
"until now our community
has been either/or: either
you're Orthodox or non-
religious; either Zionist or
(Jewishly) uninvolved; either
Argentinean or Jewish. We
want to find ways to be both
Jewish and Argentinean."
Many young Argentine
Jews, Plavnick among them,
feel that for them to be "both
Jewish and Argentinean,"
they need a communal struc-
ture which addresses the pro-
blems of Argentine society as
Jews. They warn, in the words
of Hebraica Community
Center executive director
Alberto Senderey, that "if we
don't express opinions about
the whole society, the youth
will have no option but to go
to other parties" outside the
community.
Attorney Paul Warshawsky,
who is involved in human
rights causes, feels that
Jewish youth want "to enter
into engagement with cur-
rent problems." But the of-
ficial communal structure, he
said, "has not succeeded in
putting before the youth a
coherent and moral behavior
pattern?'
Discussions about the cur-
rent policies of the DATA, the
officially recognized political
umbrella organization for
Argentine Jewry, tend to
segue very quickly and easi-
ly into bitter criticism of what
it did and did not do during
the junta's reign of terror to
help save the estimated
30,000 desaparecidos (disap-
peared), among the 1,500
Jews — and into the horror
stories that everybody has to
tell about their own relatives
and friends who disappeared
at the time. (These are
documented in Nunca Mas:
The Report of the Argentine
National Commission on the
Disappeared, New York, Far-
rar, Straus and Giroux, 1986.)
Many continue to accuse
the DATA of not being suppor-
tive of the parents of disap-
peared children. Matilda
Mellibowsky, whose daughter
Graciela was a 29-year-old
translator at the ministry of
economic affairs at the time
she was kidnapped in the
middle of the street on the
Sabbath, Sept. 21, 1976, said,
"they should have turned the
world upside down" to save
the desaparecidos.
Graciela's father, Santiago
Mellibowsky, said many
parents were told by the
DAIA, "you didn't give your
children a Jewish education
and that's why they were kid-
napped." Jacobo Fiterman, a
former president of the
Zionist Federation, said the
DAIA's attitude toward the
desaparecidos was that "they
must've done something."
He and many other Jews
pointed out, however, that
many of the young Jews who
disappeared were apolitical —
psychologists, teachers, doc-
tors and scientists. The latter
include the five Jewish
members of the 11-member
"There's no sense
in fighting for
Soviet Jewry when
they are killing
people two meters
from your home."
Atomic Energy Commission,
among them 26-year-old
Daniel Bendersky. His
parents, Fany and Jose
Bendersky, are involved with
an effort to create a Museum
of the Desaparecidos.
There were also people kid-
napped for ransom, an
estimated 30 percent of whom
were Jews. One of them,
banker Osvaldo Sivak, still
has not returned even though
his family paid the ransom.
Said Rabbi Efraim Rosenz-
weig of Cordoba, "Many peo-
ple closed their eyes. They
didn't want to see what was
happening, like in Nazi Ger-
many." Hans Levin, head of
the German Jewish congrega-
tion in Cordoba, said this
behavior was especially pain-
ful for Jews like himself, who
lost 95 percent of his family in
the Holocaust.
A former official of the
DATA told of his unsuccessful
attempts to get them to take
action. "If the junta had
demanded from them lists of
Jews, they would have turned
them over," he said.
DAIA president Dr. David
Goldberg, queried about the
charges, told a visiting North
American delegation of
Jewish journalists and com-
munal leaders that "the
Jewish community did a lot
but not enough. Even with
one disappeared, one death,
we could say we did not do
enough. But was more possi-
ble?"
Asked by this reporter
whether the DATA had under-
taken since 1983 an evalua-
.