Independent Perspective News

Seven years ago the Association was founded with the intention to reconstruct the Jewish genealogical tree. Now it has already 350 entries. The idea first appeared when a 15-year-old boy recorded his grandmother's accounts of her life.

"One can't understand who one is unless one understands where one comes from", said Eric Hobswaum, the prestigious historian, not long ago. That's precisely what the Jewish Genealogy Association in the Argentina (AGJA) was founded for.

That was seven years ago and the motives that encouraged Paul Armony, the president of the institution, were in the beginning merely personal.

"It was our son Victor who initiated our search. When he was 15 he sat by his grandmother on his father's side, with a tape recorded in his hand, and asked her to tell him the story of her life. One of the most valuable materials for genealogists is the account, the voice itself", says Eva Fried, Armony's wife and the one in charge of administering the data in the computer.

Their abundant database has already registered more than 350.000 Jews in Argentina.

Some time after that, a group of acquaintances gathered to look for their origins. At first, each of them started looking for their own surname. Paul Armony was working in international commerce and used to travel regularly. Every time he arrived at a country he would grab the telephone directory and search his last name. If he found it, he would call and try to find out whether they were relatives.

"Some people get angry when you call them to find out the connection with possible relatives. Some times people say "you want to steal my inheritance".

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Some do it to find answers to their story in the footsteps of their ancestors. That's Betina Sor's case, who found out her family had arrived in the country in 1894.

After years of research, she gave a cousin the family genealogical tree as a wedding present. "The tree was exhibited on a wall during the party and many came to me to ask me how I had done it, who I had contacted, where I had taken the data from", says Sor.

And she recounts "That day I had the feeling that the pieces of a huge jigsaw puzzle got into place".

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Memories in the shape of songs, faces, tales. Yellowish documents, old pictures, illegible letters that know many secrets. It's with such elusive and hard to trace clues that many families have been reunited, despite perhaps never had being aware of their disintegration.