Relatives and friends of the approximately 2,000 Jews among the estimated 30,000 Argentinian citizens who disappeared under the former regimes of the nation’s generals have complained that the Israeli government has not done enough to bring pressure to bear to establish the fate of the “disappeared persons.”
At a press conference here yesterday, relatives charged that the government had been dragging its feet for political reasons. They said the Foreign Ministry had had no concrete plan for dealing with the issue while the military junta was in power.
A non-Jewish woman married to an Argentinian Jew said that when her husband was killed in a roundup she had been taken to prison “as bad as a concentration camp” and had disappeared from view for more than two years, during which time she and other prisoners had been beaten and tortured.
She said that Jews had not been arrested because they were Jews, but received far worse treatment than non-Jews at the hands of anti-Semitic guards who believed they were carrying out God’s will.
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