The kidnapping last month and the reports in Buenos Aires newspapers of the torturing of Mrs. Mirta Judewicz, a teacher at the I.L.Peretz School in Buenos Aires, is part of a continuing high level of anti-Semitism in Argentina, according to Rabbi Morton M. Rosenthal, director of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith’s department of Latin American affairs. “Guardia Restauradora Nacionalista Antisemita,” the group which reportedly committed the atrocity, told Mrs. Judewicz they plan to take similar action against other members of the Argentine Jewish community.
Rabbi Rosenthal said that after members of the ICUF, the federation of Jewish cultural entities, denounced the attack to a group of national deputies, all members of the Union Civica Radical, the centrists, condemned the assault and called for creation of a bicameral federal commission to investigate acts of violence which are plaguing Argentina.
The attack on the school teacher coincided with the resurgence of anti-Semitic propaganda sold on Buenos Aires newspaper stands, Rabbi Rosenthal reported. He said that one magazine. “El Guardian de la Soberania Nacional” (The Guardian of National Sovereignty), for example, has sought to revive the discredited “Andinia Plan,” an alleged plot to create a Jewish state in southern Argentina, The magazine falsely claims that Jewish leaders have recruited military personnel to launch an insurrection.
An article in another typical publication; “Milicia,” a magazine linked to Argentine Nazis, charged that “Judaism and Marxism constitute the liberal-bourgeois vanguard of international Zionism,” Rabbi Rosenthal said.
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