Argentine President Urged to Allow Timerman and Family to Go to Israel

The American Jewish Committee yesterday urged Argentine President Jorge Videla to implement the recent Argentine Supreme Court decision which would allow Jacobo Timerman, the former editor and publisher of the newspaper La Opinion, and his family to leave for Israel.

In a cable to Videla, Richard Maass, AJCommittee president, said that “I and all true friends of Argentina” would see the gesture of allowing Timerman to leave Argentina “as an auspicious beginning for your new term in the Presidency” which starts in August.

Timerman, a Jew, was arrested April 15, 1977 on suspicion of illegal economic activities. He was eventually cleared by a military tribunal but remained in army prison until he was allowed to return to his apartment in Buenos Aires last April where he has remained under house arrest.

Jacob Kovadloff, head of South American affairs for the AJCommittee, a native Argentinian and a lifelong friend of the 55-year-old Timerman, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that various friends of the journalist had been trying for months to get a write of habeas corpus to free Timerman. He said that a lower court refused but the Supreme Court recently ruled that there were no legal grounds for holding Timerman.

UNDER CONSTANT WATCH

Kovadloff said that since being allowed to return home, Timerman is constantly watched and his phone is tapped. He said the journalist wants to go to Israel with his wife and child to join two other children who have been in Israel for the past year.

Kovadloff, who was head of the AJCommittee’s office in Argentina, himself left the country last year after he was repeatedly threatened. The AJCommittee closed its offices at the time. La Opinion, edited by Timerman, is considered a leading liberal newspaper as well as one that strongly supported Israel. Argentine sources report that although the newspaper is now under government receivership, it continues its pro-Israeli policy.

Maass, in his cable to Videla, noted that he had met with the Argentine President at his invitation last September. “I and those who accompanied me were impressed with your frankness and with your determination to do what was in your power to bring the turmoil in Argentina to an end and to heal the wounds of your countrymen incurred during the last few years of anguish,” Maass wrote Videla. He said that the “gesture” toward Timerman “and other measures which we hope you will undertake, will alleviate the anxieties of many Argentine families, and will create the basis for greater understanding between our two countries.”