Episode 60: The Jewish Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo

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Nahanni Rous: Hi, it’s Nahanni Rous. Welcome back to Can We Talk?, the podcast of the Jewish Women’s Archive, where gender, history, and Jewish culture meet. In this episode, we continue our series featuring new content from JWA’s Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women. The updated Encyclopedia, launching at the end of June, is the most extensive digital resource on Jewish women in the world. 

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Nahanni: In 1976, in Argentina, a military dictatorship seized power in what came to be known as the Dirty War. The regime systematically kidnapped, tortured and killed anyone suspected of opposition, including priests, teachers, and members of labor unions and protest movements. Bodies were thrown into the River Plate and never recovered. Hundreds of pregnant women were kidnapped, allowed to deliver their babies, and then killed. Their babies were given to military families. The thirty-thousand victims, who were never heard from again, are known as “the disappeared”. Twelve-percent of them were Jewish, even though Jews accounted for only one percent of the population of Argentina. A year into the “Dirty War,” a group of mothers whose grown children had been disappeared, began demonstrating in the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires. Many of them were Jewish women. 

Natasha Zaretsky: And so during this time of tremendous fear and terror, these women were the only ones who were really standing up publicly and demanding that something happened and their children be returned. 

Nahanni: Natasha Zaretsky is an anthropologist who focuses on human rights, memory, and justice. She writes about the Jewish Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in JWA’s updated Encyclopedia of Jewish Women. Natasha says the movement began with a group of mothers publicly demanding to know what had been done to their sons and daughters.

Natasha: So you have women who started standing every Thursday afternoon in the main public square in Argentina, which faces the presidential palace. They wore simple white headscarves into which they stitched the names of their children and the dates of their disappearance and they would hold pictures of their children, as well. And they did this every Thursday afternoon.

[Sound of demonstration… woman saying names and “presente”]

Natasha: At first, they were kind of ignored and no one really paid attention to them. And there was no retribution from the authorities. And there was almost a certain sacredness to the fact that they were mothers. And then as they receive more international attention, that's when they started being targeted as well. There were a number of mothers who were kidnapped,, um, and tortured and detained and yet they remained in that Plaza, putting their own bodies at risk, um, in order to try to find some kind of justice. When thinking about these mothers, what's important is that it's not just about their individual stories. It's also really about the collective struggle to find out what happened to everybody who's disappeared. And the reason why mothers were able to do this as opposed to fathers is because if a group of men were congregating in the Plaza, they would have been instantly detained and taken away. But if your mother is standing there. There was something that was almost sacred about their role as mothers, so at first they weren't targeted because of that, because they didn't look like they were a potential danger to the Argentine government because they were just women standing around. And then over time, as there was more attention given to them, it realized that actually the fact that they were just you know, mother's standing there, that that was at the heart of their power. 

[Protest sound]

Natasha: The Jewish mothers who were involved in this movement, their history was also marked by anti-Semitic violence, um, and by a history of genocide. And so the way that they came to understand this activism also connected to their own histories of trying to find a space of belonging in Argentina, in the Americas, after leaving Europe, precisely because of violence from the state. So that was very much a part of many of their stories. And we see this in… So I'll talk about some of the, some of the Jewish mothers of the Plaza macho and how they, how they speak to this history in different ways. So, uh, Renee Applebaum, uh, was one of the founding members of the mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. And she was born in Argentina’s Entre Rios province to Jewish parents who immigrated from Russia. Um, and she has a devastating story because all three of her children were disappeared during the dictatorship and after their disappearance, she began advocating with the mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. And she continued working with them over many years. And then she also took her story more internationally as well. She testified before the United nations and she really fought to repeal the amnesty laws that also went into place after the end of the dictatorship. And so Renee’s story is very much like many of the mothers, which is that their activism didn't stop when the dictatorship ended in 1983.

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Natasha: Some of the other Jewish mothers were also involved in other ways, um, in relation to these dynamics of memory and justice. So, um, Sara Brodsky was a member of the mothers of the Plaza de Mayo whose son Fernando was disappeared in 1979. And he was taken to, um, the ESMA, which was a torture center. And ESMA stands for the school of Naval mechanics. 5,000 people were tortured in this space and it's located in the city. So it's right next to apartment buildings and, you know, people walking by and this was happening behind the Gates. And, uh, Sara gave her testimony in both the 1985 trial of the juntas, which was the military trial, even though those who were convicted, there were later pardoned, and she also testified more recently, um, in the ESMA mega trial, which took place from 2012 to 2017. 

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Natasha: There are other ways in which Jewish mothers were really important to the history and memory of what happened. Uh, Matilda Melibovsky is a mother whose daughter Graziella was disappeared in 1976. And, uh, Matilda was very involved in the mothers of the Plaza de Maggio and the Jewish movement for human rights. But one of her really important contributions was also a book that she compiled called Circle of Love Over Death. And this was a compilation of the testimonies of the family members of those who were disappeared. And it was one of the very first explorations into the lived experiences of those who lost family members during the dictatorship. And it just speaks to the importance of testimony in people's lives and their experiences as a way to stand up to this kind of state terror and to resist the kind of silence that the military dictatorship needed in many ways to hold onto their power. So Matilda's work was really important in that way. 

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Natasha: In thinking about what it means to connect what happened during the dictatorship to other histories of violence as a way to, to fight for a better future, Um, there are two other mothers who I'll talk about. One is Vera Vigevani de Jarach who was born in 1928 in Milan, and she emigrated to Argentina in 1939. So this was before World War II began. But her family and who remained in Italy, were affected by the Holocaust and, and, and were, were killed during that time. And, you know, Vera's daughter Franca was disappeared in Argentina and, you know, she later found out that she died during a death flight and that she was also held at the ESMA torture center and these death flights, they're horrible to think about where they would, you know, drug the people who they detained and then fly them over the River Plate, and then they would just drop their bodies into the water. And so, you know, that sense of not having a body or not having a grave to be able to mourn that body is just so devastating. And in 2017, there was a ceremony at the park of memory in Argentina, uh, and the German minister Angela Merkel was there and Vera approached her and talked about what it meant not to have a grave for her daughter and also not to have a grave for her grandfather as well, who was killed at Auschwitz.

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Natasha: I think for me, um, what makes the story of the Jewish mothers stand out, um, is how it's also inflected by other histories of violence and what it means for someone who is affected by not just one period of genocide, but more than one. And you have someone like Sara Rus, who's one of the mothers who I write about who is a survivor of Auschwitz and who immigrated to Argentina in 1948, trying to find a better life for herself and to rebuild after having survived a genocide. And then she arrives in Argentina. She gets married. She has children. And, you know, her son was disappeared. And you know, for me the story of how even one person who's gone through something like this has the power and the ability to stand up week after week and to continue her advocacy over all these years, giving her testimony, talking to schools, you know, sharing her story and her experience because as she put it, she wants there to be a better world of some kind, which is, you know, what she believed her family would find in Argentina. And then, uh, this what happened to them and the way that they in her words were tortured and killed, um, in the same way as what happened under the Nazis, um, she feels that this could never be forgotten.

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Natasha: In Argentina, remembering your loved ones is a way to resist their disappearance from the public consciousness. And that was one of the things that the military in power, or I would argue any genocidal state tries to do, which is not just, um, kill and torture, but also silence and erase the very existence of the humanity of people and their history without leaving a trace. 

[Protest sound]

Natasha: You know there is so much pain there. And, but for me, as someone who does research in Argentina, there's also a tremendous amount of hope because of how they've been able to hold on to the possibility of some kind of justice, even when it seemed really impossible to ever find anything there. And then things started changing and you know, that sense of possibility, even years and years and years later, was so important to hold on to. And I think it's not just important for them but also for Argentina as a democracy and as a nation. So their activism will live on because of how it's almost baked into the democracy in Argentina. 

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Nahanni: The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo maintained weekly demonstrations for over 40 years… right up until Covid, when the Plaza was closed to public gatherings. The movement continues to press for accountability for the perpetrators through ongoing human rights trials in Argentina, though many of the original members died without seeing any of the perpetrators brought to trial. Thank you for listening to Can We Talk?, the podcast of the Jewish Women’s Archive. We had help on this episode from Carol Zall. Our team also includes Judith Rosenbaum and Becky Long. Our theme music is by Girls in Trouble. You also heard "Forgotten" by Whitesand. Special thanks to Natasha Zaretsky for talking with us about the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, including Renee Appelbaum, Sara Rus, Sarah Brodksy, Vera Vigevani de Jarach and Matilde Melibovsky. Natasha also wrote the article on the movement for JWA’s updated Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women. The Encylopedia’s new edition will be unveiled in late June. Join us on June 27th and 28th for a celebratory global day of learning, with sessions based on the Encyclopedia’s new content. Stay tuned for more information!

I’m your host, Nahanni Rous. Until next time.

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