Introduction

With respect to some questions posed to me about the anti-DAIA cam- paign, I wish to say, first, that I’m an outsider here. I am interested in no one’s history but my own. My behavior, what I did, is what I can talk about. As for the internal controversies of the community, who am I to stick my nose in? I can take a plane tomorrow and I’m gone. I think that what we’re all doing right now is making small contributions for the time when history will be written. I don’t believe we ourselves write history. Others write history using the contributions each one of us has left be- hind. The historian will take the sum of what has been said … and ana- lyze that information, weigh it, and reach conclusions. I don’t believe we can set ourselves up as judges, because we were participants, emotionally involved in this process. I believe that the community has nothing to gain from this controversy since, rather than worrying about external enemies or serious internal problems that existed here when I departed, [it] can- not bleed to death over a topic on which no one today has the right to do anything but make a personal contribution, a personal version. Let his- tory, then, be written by the historians. Rabbi Roberto Graetz, testimony given in 1984 about his role in the Argentine Jewish community between 1975 and 19811 ∵

I came upon the words of Rabbi Roberto Graetz at just the right moment. I had a strange feeling after reading about the Jewish community in during the military dictatorship. I began the pages of each document knowing what the ending would be: condemnation of the local community leadership, doubts about the conduct of international Jewish organizations or the Israeli diplomatic legation, and, finally, the opinion of a few individuals who, in con- trast, stood out as courageous activists, denouncing the atrocities committed by the regime. One of the things that surprised me was that, in general, my research ended up corroborating—if not replicating—what Jacobo Timerman, one of the

1 Graetz served as Rabbi at the Templo Emanu-El and was a member of the secretariat of the Permanent Assembly for Human Rights (APDH).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004388031_002 2 Introduction most publicly acknowledged victims, bore witness to in his 1981 book, Prisoner without a Name, Cell without a Number. Everything was there to confirm those impressions. The focus of the previous studies remained to be one of the top- ics that his narrative had given shape to: the anti-Semitic nature of the regime and the treatment meted out to Jews detained by military taskforces operating under its auspices. Since that moment, it became clear to me how a series of meanings had been constructed around the Jews during the military dictatorship that it was inconvenient to put into question. After presenting some preliminary findings of my research at a congress of the Latin American Jewish Studies Association, held at University in 2009, some of those in attendance approached me to point out some differences of opinion. My paper, based on a minute indexing of all the issues of the Jewish weekly Nueva Presencia, addressed the characteristics of and changes in the editorial line of a publication that was held up to be one of the few examples of media that dared criticize the regime where it most hurt: human rights violations. After perusing, numbering, and classifying each article that appeared in the weekly since its first appearance, on July 9, 1977, up to the presidential inau- guration of Raúl Alfonsín, on December 10, 1983, I was able to gauge the emer- gence of an early approach to the problem of human rights violations. The first reference appeared in 1981. Nevertheless, not even then did it become a cen- tral issue in the weekly. It was only in 1984 that Nueva Presencia closed ranks with the agendas of human rights organizations, inviting some of their most renowned figures to become part of a relatively stable staff of writers. Did my research detract from what Nueva Presencia had accomplished dur- ing the military dictatorship? Quite the contrary: it pointed out how extensive concern for asking “what was done about the disappeared” did not diminish the bold stand of a publication that was motivated to address other issues, too—such as a woman’s place in marriage, the workplace, and in bed—in the opprobrious climate of the military dictatorship. I was thus very pleased with my work when I arrived in . Nevertheless, several members of the audience demanded to know what my interest was in casting doubt on Herman Schiller, who was the chief edi- tor of the weekly during that period.2 Why did I say nothing about the daily

2 Nueva Presencia being one of the most significative publications for the analysis of social at- titudes during Argentina’s last dictatorship, Herman Schiller’s previous journalistic trajectory within the Jewish press has been invisibilized: he had also been chief-editor of El Observador (an Organización Sionista Argentina publication), had written columns for Mundo Israelita as well as open letters about the Middle-East conflict in Nueva Sión before creating Nueva Presencia.