Jacobo Timerman, the former editor and publisher of the Buenos Aires daily, La Opinion, who was released last month after being held under house arrest by the Argentine military government for two and a half years and is now living in Israel, will be honored by the American Jewish Committee at its annual National Executive Council (NEC) meeting Oct.25-28 at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco. The NEC is the AJ Committee’s top policy-making body.
Timerman, who arrived in Israel Sept. 27 and immediately was made a citizen is now a columnist for Maariv. His first series of columns will deal with his experiences in Argentine and is due to be reprinted in a number of papers around the world. The director of the International Press Institute, Peter Galliner, in a telegram to Timerman yesterday, expressed his own and the institute’s admiration for Timerman’s courage and determination in his fight against “the unjustified persecution from the Argentine authorities. He has earned the respect of all those who believe in freedom of the press.”
Timerman will receive the AJ Committee’s Institute of Human Relations Media Award at the Executive Council’s gala annual dinner on Saturday evening, Oct. 27. It will be his first public appearance in the United States since his departure from Argentina.
Other speakers scheduled to address the meeting include former Israel Premier Yitzhak Rabin; Rabbi Alexander Schindler, president of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations; Benjamin Swig, of San Francisco, philanthropist and civic leader, and a member of the AJ Committee’s NEC, who will receive the AJC’s Distinguished Leadership Award; Richard Maass, AJ Committee’s president; and Bertram Gold, its executive vice president.
TOPICS TO BE CONSIDERED
Under the chairmanship of Dr. Morton Blaustein of Baltimore, more than 400 AJ Committee leaders are expected to attend the San Francisco meeting, whose purpose is to assess the current national and international scenes and to develop polices that will server as guidelines for the organization’s activities in the coming year.
Among the topics to be considered will be the Palestinian issue and other developments in the Middle East; new dimensions in Black-Jewish relations, the Jewish stake in oil and energy; United States immigration policy; conversions to Judaism and their impact on Jewish families and communities; and the status of Jews in the Soviet Union, South America, and other parts of the world. The meeting will also consider options for a more active AJ Committee policy against apartheid in South Africa.
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