Remembering Rita Arditti: (1934-December 25, 2009)

Early in 1998, Rita Arditti, living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, wrote to me in Dallas, saying she had found out through Sephardic acquaintances that I was planning a Jewish heritage tour to my native Turkey in June, and was interested in joining it. She was born in Buenos Aires, but she wanted to see Turkey, where her parents had been born. She said she knew the address in Izmir where her mother's house had been, and I could almost see her jump with joy when I told her that was on the same street and neighborhood where I was born and raised! Her excitement was contagious, infecting her friend and partner Estelle Disch, who accompanied her on the tour, and eventually each person in the group.

Rita loved everything we did, saw, and ate in Turkey. We visited the great monuments of Istanbul, the ancient ruins of Troy and Ephesus, the fantastic formations of Capadoccia, and places of Jewish interest everywhere, meeting and talking to local people. But for her, no doubt, the highlight was seeing her mother's house in Izmir. The building on Mithatpasha street was not intact, but it had not totally disappeared, either, as had most of the other houses, including mine, replaced by ugly four- or five-story row-apartments. This one still had the old pale green painted stucco façade, stuck like a partial mask onto the new building which rose behind it. Rita was delighted to see the old marble steps leading from the sidewalk to the original iron door, and the white-painted wooden balkoniko (bay-window) on the second floor. As a young girl in the early 1920s, before she emigrated with her parents and siblings to Buenos Aires, Argentina, on the other side of the world, Rosa Cordovero¹ had stepped on these steps and gone through that door, and from the balkon she had watched the passing scene on the cobblestone street below, with its horse-drawn trams, itinerant vendors, overloaded donkeys, and familiar neighborhood people. I knew Rita was seeing the entire scene in her mind's eye. Our group also visited the large, elegant Bet Israel synagogue up the street, which Rita's family had no doubt attended, still remembering the long years of that building's construction and its final opening in 1905.² Rita was, as we say in Ladino, bolando de la alegriya (flying with joy.)

Rita didn't tell us much about herself during that 17-day trip. Only when we asked her, did she respond that she was a biologist, and that she was working on a book about the young people who had disappeared in Argentina. At the time neither she nor I was aware that the other had an article in the special issue of Bridges that year dedicated to Sephardi and Mizrahi Women.³ Rita and I corresponded for a while after the tour, and in 1999 she let me know that her book, Searching for Life: The Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo and the Disappeared Children of Argentina, had been published. I have since learned that in 2001, when the grandmothers were nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, Rita's book was part of the supporting documentation offered for that nomination.

Almost a decade would pass before I realized how much Rita had accomplished in her life. Last September, on my Internet chat group Ladinokomunita⁴ there was a discussion about a film shown on PBS television concerning the disappeared people of Argentina. I wrote that Rita Arditi, one of our own Sephardic people, had the best book on the subject. That reminded me to contact her again before I traveled to Argentina at the end of October. But I also wanted to write more on Rita, so I did an Internet search on her. The information I found was astounding! Not that I didn't know that Rita was a woman of science and of compassion; I even knew she was a breast cancer survivor, and involved in feminist issues. But I had had...