The Holocaust Again?: Dispatches from the Jewish "Internal Front" in Dictatorship Argentina

Undoubtedly, the greatest density of Holocaust discourse in Latin America can be found in Argentina in response to the military dictatorship of 1976 to 1983, known by its official name, "Proceso de Reorganización Nacional" (National Reorganization Process). Since the mid-1990s in Argentina it is common to find comparisons between the Holocaust and the Proceso. Less recognized is the extent to which Holocaust references circulated during the dictatorship period. Particularly striking is the case of journalist and newspaper publisher Jacobo Timerman, the most internationally well-known victim of the dictatorship. Timerman, the author of the acclaimed book Prisoner without a Name, Cell without a Number, was detained and tortured by the military in 1977 then deported to Israel in 1979. His situation provoked numerous debates in the Argentine Jewish "internal front," as it was often ironically called, and deepened the ideological fissures dividing the Jewish community during the dictatorhip period.¹

During the Proceso, comparison of the military government to the Nazis and its repression to the Holocaust was a common way of expressing opposition to the regime. In non-Jewish circles in Argentina, this was generally limited to the clandestine press during the first year of the dictatorship.² In the Jewish community, however, these analogies did not circulate publicly until later, and were initially centered on the Timerman case. What is significant about the Timerman case is that he also used Holocaust references, particularly the loaded term "Judenrat," to criticize the Jewish authorities in Argentina, accusing them of complicity through silence in the face of anti-Semitism. This generated an argument about the extent of anti-Semitism during the dictatorship and whether the situation in Argentina of that time could properly be compared to the Holocaust. These disagreements about the legitimacy of comparisons between the Holocaust and Argentina under dictatorship were a symptom of the fractures within the Jewish community, which lacked consensus on the most important issues of the day: the political legitimacy of state repression, its magnitude and scale, the moral status of its victims, and the role of individual Jews and of Jewish communal leadership in responding to it. The Timerman case thus served as a vehicle to rehearse debates among Jews about how to interpret and respond to the demands of the times.

These divisions have been the subject of some scholarship, including two recent books.³ But not the use of polemical Holocaust references such as "Judenrat" and "Jews of Silence" in these debates. Timerman's statements in this regard, as well as the responses offered by his main target, the authorities of the Jewish umbrella group Delegación de Asociaciones Israelitas Argentinas (the Delegation of Argentine Jewish Associations, or DAIA), thus merit further analysis. The DAIA was formed in the 1930s and to this day is considered the "official" representative of the Jewish community, providing Jews with organized leadership. Though widely respected as an effective voice against anti-Semitism, by the 1960s it had come to be associated with conservative political tendencies, and its ability to represent a pluralist Jewish community was often called into question, especially by younger Jews. Indeed, ever since the 1940s, from within a few years of its inception, the DAIA's mandate to represent the Jewish community has been contested and politicized—from the "bitter conquest" of the DAIA over non-Zionist Jewish leftists in 1952, to the competing responses to Peronism and subsequent anti-Peronist governments from within the Jewish "internal front."⁴ This state of affairs persists to the present day, sharpened most recently in the wake of the 1994 bombing of the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina (the Argentine Israelite Mutual Association, or AMIA), the Buenos Aires kehila, when the DAIA leadership's unsavory links to the government of President Carlos Menem created a conflict of interest that hindered a full investigation of the attack and provoked a storm of criticism from the Jewish community. Since the days of the first Peronist regime, the DAIA has negotiated what appears, at times, to be a self-contradictory stance regarding its relationship to Argentine politics: professing its...