Between repression and resistance: policies and pedagogy in the ICUF institutions during the last civic-military dictatorship (1976 - 1983)

Abstract

On March 24, 1976, the National Reorganization Process began in the Argentine Republic, in a scenario of high political conflict. A Military Junta, following a coup d'état, assumes the government of the country, and will try to monitor and intervene in the behavior of people, institutions and the educational system. It is the purpose to analyze, in this context, the functioning of some pedagogical activities developed in cultural and recreational institutions of the ICUF, which were constituted as spaces of containment and resistance, with projects that offered ‘another’ education, outside the ‘official’ school. A review of some of these experiences is proposed, recovering period documentation and testimonies of participants taking into account the discontinuities that imposed threats, bans, closures, raids, exiles, arrests, disappearances and destruction of archives. This aims to make a contribution that, from the methodological perspective of recent history and oral history, redefines these pedagogical proposals and their impact on the field of the history of education.

Keywords:
dictatorship; memory; testimonies; documents

Resumen

El 24 de marzo de 1976 se inicia en la República Argentina, en un escenario de alta conflictividad política, el Proceso de Reorganización Nacional. Una Junta Militar, a partir de un golpe de Estado, asume el gobierno del país e intentará vigilar e intervenir en las conductas de las personas, las instituciones y el sistema educativo. El propósito es analizar, en ese contexto, el funcionamiento de algunas actividades pedagógicas desarrolladas en instituciones culturales y recreativas del ICUF, que se constituyeron en espacios de contención y resistencia, con proyectos que ofrecieron una ‘otra’ educación, fuera de la escuela ‘oficial’. Se propone una revisión de algunas de esas experiencias, recuperando documentación de época y testimonios de participantes, atendiendo a las discontinuidades que impusieron amenazas, proscripciones, clausuras, allanamientos, exilios, detenciones, desapariciones y destrucción de archivos. Con ello, se pretende aportar, desde la perspectiva metodológica de la historia reciente y la historia oral, una resignificación de esas propuestas pedagógicas y su incidencia en el campo de la historia de la educación.

Palabras clave:
dictadura; memoria; testimonios; documentos

Resumo

Em 24 de março de 1976 teve início o Processo de Reorganização Nacional na República Argentina, num cenário de elevado conflito político. Uma Junta Militar, na sequência de um golpe de Estado, assume o governo do país, e tentará monitorizar e intervir no comportamento das pessoas, das instituições e do sistema educativo. Pretende-se analisar, neste contexto, o funcionamento de algumas atividades pedagógicas desenvolvidas em instituições culturais e recreativas do ICUF, que se constituíram como espaços de contenção e resistência, com projetos que ofereciam uma ‘outra’ educação, fora do ‘oficial’ escola. Propõe-se uma revisão de algumas destas experiências, recuperando documentação de época e testemunhos dos participantes tendo em conta as descontinuidades que impuseram ameaças, proibições, encerramentos, rusgas, exílios, prisões, desaparecimentos e destruição de arquivos. Pretende-se dar um contributo que, na perspectiva metodológica da história recente e da história oral, redefina estas propostas pedagógicas e o seu impacto no campo da história da educação.

Palavras-chave:
ditadura; memoria; testemunhos; documentos

Introduction

Someday, someone will have to write this story. Invisible as breath, silent as friendship, decisive as blood. It must remembered that in the midst of the silence and the massacre, there were groups that not a single week of all months stopped meeting to study, to discuss, to continue dreaming, and projecting, and proposing (Concatti, 1997, p. 334).

This introduction aims to present the ICUF¹ organization, some of its structures and institutions and place its actions in a timeline that transcends the last civic-military dictatorship in Argentina, recovers ideological positions and educational experiences crossed by persecution, as well as various forms of resistance and circulation and adaptation of pedagogical ideas.

Addressing the educational proposals of the ICUF - Ídisher Kultur Farband- related to school, culture and leisure activities during the last dictatorship (1976 - 1983) requires reviewing chronology, territorialities, institutions and a broad pedagogical project.

There are almost forty previous years of progressive Jewish militancy linked to the national left-wing², with the concern for the preservation and transmission of an Idishist humanist cultural legacy³, with the challenge of learning to live in a distant land carrying the baggage of forced migration, for the demand to accept, accept oneself and be accepted in a society that manifested itself as contradictory between approval, suspicion and even rejection; for the adjustments imposed by national and regional political changes - which included previous and simultaneous dictatorships - and international ones, against the backdrop of the marks of wars in Europe and the socialist camp conflicts.

After forty years of uninterrupted democracy in Argentina, it has been facilitated, from the institutional continuity, to recover ‘hidden’ or forgotten passages of those experiences, restore documentary and testimonial archives and ask questions. In the answers, there are signs of how the theoretical ideas that circulated from the European socialist block and the influence of the Argentine Communist Party, the Cuban revolutionary experience, the Latin American and national political-pedagogical formulations impacted on popular education and the marks they left in the history of education. There is also a record of institutions and actions that had to be deactivated due to persecution and restrictions or fear, destruction of bibliographic and documentary collections and a list of 2,000 missing Jews⁴, of whom 50 participated in icufist pedagogical activities⁵, which together with dismissed, prisoners, exiled and internal exiles, inform levels of personal political militancy and commitment from the organizations⁶.

To restore moments, places, people and ideas so diverse and with the particularity of being crossed by distant wars and nearby dictatorships, by mobilities and absences, three questions are necessarily posed to which this article will only partially answer. They are: what documentation is available -the archives-, how to recover the missing records and the sensations and emotions -the testimonies- and how to order and locate particular topics and events -the borders.

The question of archives proposes the tension between a tradition of safeguarding an institutional past, the conditions that led to the destruction of documents during the dictatorships of 1966 and 1976 and subsequent actions with the concern for the recovery and preservation of a documentary, testimonial and bibliographic corpus⁷. The archive forms not only a discursive regime, but also a historical-pedagogical device and a sensitive regime inscribed on a social surface, with statements and visibilities that collaborate in the classification and hierarchy of footprints (Tello, 2018); in this case, those left not only by the activities carried out, but also by their theoretical foundations that are a reflection of an ideology and a culture of the time. It questions the relationships between a localized past, a present and the perspective of the marks that are chosen to be left for the future; it anticipates hypotheses regarding the history that will be passed on as a legacy. It is a way of projection, of reading and thinking about time and of restoring the place of protagonists and witnesses in relation to the pedagogical and political actions that are analyzed.

It is not an easy task to reconstruct the decisions that the ICUF institutions made in terms of archiving or ‘unarchiving’⁸. The searches - both methodological and random - point to the concern to record deeds, plans, accounting balances, school and recreational planning, tests, translations, graphic, cinematographic and sound productions, through founding and operating proceedings. But they cannot fail to mention - especially in relation to the absences - the measures which forced the political situations, and the institutional readings made upon them. The dictatorships -not only that of 1976- brought threats and execution of arrests, closures, raids and banishments. The last one added disappearance of activists, teachers and participants, which provoked self-censorship, storage of information in spaces that were later forgotten or private holdings.

Our innocent files were destroyed year after year for fear of involving someone, in case of a forced entry, such as the one we once suffered and then having the lists of activists, teachers or colony members to fall into the hands of the repressive entities that at every stage of our history, from the sad "special laws" section of the 1950s to the state terrorism of the 1970s that we suffered. Fear that successive coups d 'état created, attempting to paralyze and demobilize the people (Kirzner, 1999, author's quotation marks).

Thus, documentary gaps were generated and were managed to be partially restored by oral or written testimonies. This explains the decision in this paper to incorporate a significant number of them.

Although the personal and evaluative notion of what is experienced survives in the testimony, which is affirmed in the ambition of fidelity of memory, the fact that the word is given makes it possible, in addition to the gesture of democratization, from reading or listening, to produce other interpretations, perhaps different from that contained in the text of the testimony. Thus, the field of knowledge and understanding of the recent past is significantly enriched and expanded. The comprehensive task makes it possible - in this case in relation to dictatorships - to reconstruct situations that would otherwise be lost, assuming the place of subjectivity and involvement in first-person accounts. In addition, it adds faces and ‘authorship’ to what is said but also to what is not said, to silences, to ‘gaps’; to what is remembered and to what is left outside the selection of memory. It collaborates in the construction of legacies and makes it possible for the transmission to take place, preserves memories from the position of listening, while increasing the dimension that reconstitutes of social ties (Pittaluga, 2007).

The operation of witnessing and archiving propose, on the one hand, a dialogue between the relationships of subjectivation and materialization to which one can return again and again, knowing that each return can bring novelties and, simultaneously, another dialogue between the contributions of the historical and educational perspective, strengthening the field of the history of education studies, in this case, recent history and education outside school.

In each operation, be it collection, archiving or review, personal involvement is inevitable and compromises the content. In sensitive topics such as dictatorships, violence, state authoritarianism, forced migration, discrimination, with impacts on private lives, institutional activities and societies, approaches that affect the construction of new/other objects and historiographic meanings and assume various logics regarding temporalities are imposed. The testimony that follows is a good example of what was said if it were analyzed before or after the contributions that the trials meant to the military juntas⁹.

Utopia. Utopia for us, for them the struggle. They could not forgive the desire to build a different future. That is paid for, and they have been overcharged [...]But we have memory, we, and future generations, will not forget or forgive the kidnappers, those who cut your lives short, those who interrupted your dreams. We will continue to ask for justice (Ginzberg, 2000)¹⁰.

Establishing borders - as a matter of order - allows them to be thought of as a limit and as a place of passage, but also of transgression and concealment; as an exercise in institutional demarcation to look inward and outward; as a space for negotiation and even with reparative functions. In general, they are a territory of mediation and, in particular, a pedagogical one, due to the condition of porosity that allows to set limits and get the perception to 'vary', regarding the distances between inside and outside, far and near, the possible and the desirable and also the allowed and the prohibited.

The dictatorship of 1976 took advantage of this porous condition to implement modes of control based on punitive devices and measures and to give breadth to the concept of subversive - the subversive, the subversive person - including everything that could be understood as criticism, non-compliance or opposition to the regime.

In educational spaces - not only there - the dictatorship justified its actions by operating and stimulating suspicion, detection and denunciation against everything that could be considered subversive. It tried to monitor actors - until getting them to disappear in some cases - and educational projects, controlling behaviors and relationships, hardening teaching devices, emptying curricular proposals, prohibiting and burning books and displacing teachers and their guild representations establishing the meaning

[...] of war, enemies, subversion, infiltration, terms not used in contemporary Argentine history and especially in areas such as education and culture; but that is the harsh reality and as such it must be assumed and faced: with rawness and courage [...]¹¹ (Ministerio de Cultura y Educación, 1977, p. 5).

The ICUF institutions were not excluded from these control mechanisms. And since the defense of public school was an inalienable cause, those that functioned under its protection had the status of complementary and idiomatic in Yiddish, based on the community values of secular Judaism, democracy and justice, which were not renounced even in times of dictatorships (Kaufmann, 2008).

Just as educational and cultural activities went beyond the school, including sports¹², arts¹³, recreational activities¹⁴, references to the places of origin of immigrants¹⁵ and links with organizations of the ‘national street’, the dictatorship's marks and actions of resistance can be found in all of them with the bias of disruptive pedagogies.

Over the years and generational changes, concern for the Yiddish teaching decreased. Even so, the possibility of establishing comprehensive schooling, accepted and expanded by the Jewish schools gathered around the Vaad Hajinuj¹⁶ was rejected. It was one of many ways to make clear the differences between Zionist and progressive institutions (Visacovsky, 2015) in relation to the defense of public school. But this wasn't the only concern,

[...] analyzing the various activities of schools, kindergartens and extracurricular activities, we noticed in them a relative stagnation or small progress. This makes those responsible for these fronts immediately devote themselves to the study of the situation and the measures to be adopted to overcome it, both pedagogically and organizationally (Consejo Central del ICUF, 1966, p. 3).

During the last military dictatorship, the two remaining Idishist language schools were closed. Their kindergartens were still open for some more time.

The political and pedagogical mission fell on the children's clubs, the holiday centers and the camps, sustained in a broad theoretical arc that ran from Piaget, Wallon and Vigotsky to Makarenko and Korczak, from Decroly and Montessori to Freire, Lieke Kogan, Tzalel Blitz and Berta Braslavsky, considering in a particular way the game, work, critical thinking, modes of coexistence in co-education, the relationship with adults pointing out marked differences with the ‘outside’, with the educational system and with other cultural and club offerings (Diamant, 2021).

Each of the federated institutions in the ICUF felt asked to

[...] fulfill a political task [...] that is not that of any political party and is traced by the movement in each of its congresses [...] The existence of the Jewish-Progressive Movement has the enormous political importance of demonstrating that our community is not monolithically Zionist and that right-wing sectors coexist within it with democratic and progressive forces, therefore it is important to disseminate our clear stances: with respect to the defense of public freedoms, repudiation of economic policy and the fight against anti-Semitism, for disarmament and peace, and our position in the face of the conflict in the Near East and the policy of the Israeli government (Asociación Israelita CER de Buenos, ca. 1970), p. 1).

The educational recreation proposals were a exhilarating push, thanks to a generational and professional change in the pedagogical teams that shifted the responsibility for the ideological transmission initially assumed by volunteer activists to new professional teams, coinciding with a significant number of normal teachers getting their degrees- among its participants, mostly children of immigrants - and the graduation of the first undergraduates of Educational Sciences, Psychology and Sociology degrees from Argentine universities. These projects were thought and experienced as political and pedagogical challenges that were transformed with the progress of social and economic conditions, expanding or restricting their operation while occupying places as an object of study in the field of social sciences in general and pedagogy and the history of education in particular.

What began as a reparative and containment institutional construction in host territories for immigrants and heirs, which sheltered survivors of the Nazi genocide and anti-Semitism, bearers of personal, family, and cultural losses, was also a prospective construction that maintained some of these foundational characteristics - not without contradictions - in subsequent challenges. Dictatorships were exemplary cases that forced the coexistence of ruptures and closures with the foundational effort to sustain, accommodate and resist, marking a powerful challenge to educational proposals.

It is possible to design a chronology of actions that, since the 1950s, crossed both in self-perception and in the external gaze in relation to the pedagogical, and that pointed out, in the discourse of the recent history of education, vanguard considerations in post-war times; the Spanish Soviet and Republican influences and the impact of the Cold War; advanced with the contributions of popular education and the stimulus of the Cuban Revolution; of resistance during dictatorships; of commotion during the Malvinas War. There are also marks of the advance of liberalism and ‘menemization’¹⁷, of reconstitution after the 2001 crisis¹⁸ and finally of numerical growth and adaptation to new demands.

It is understood that this background could anticipate explanations on how things were conducted during the last civic-military and ecclesiastical dictatorship and even after - not without contradictions - with responses between creative and risky, which so compromised activities, participants and heritage funds.

The political and pedagogical responses to situations and actions of persecution, resistance and reparation are in the founding marks of the ICUF, and were ‘updated’. The participation in the struggles for the improvement of the working conditions of workers and the creation of unions, international causes such as the presence in the Jewish Brigades fighting in defense of the Spanish Republic¹⁹ (Kinoshita, 2000), militancy in the International Red Aid in support of the actions of the Soviet army²⁰ and in Action Antinazi²¹ are some of the facts that, in addition to pointing out stances and ideological commitment, were transformed into contents of educational transmission. Then there were the coups d 'état in Argentina and the region that also marked institutional life²².

The background of migrations forced by ethnic, ideological persecution or hunger, strengthened the amalgam between past and future, with convictions and desires for a different world, and the need to give a place to those who required special support. Such is the case of the solidarity networks between first migrants²³ and, later with the dictatorships in the region, the containment of exiles, children of political prisoners and disappeared, dismissed, who found refuge in the ICUF institutions, opportunities for their education and work development.

Before the 1976 dictatorship: the Argentine Revolution and the Triple A.

On June 28, 1966, a coup d ' état²⁴ called the Argentine Revolution overthrew the democratically elected President Arturo Illia, a member of the radical party. It lasted until 1973, led by Juan Carlos Onganía and supported by the Army, the Air Force and the Navy. The activity of political parties, groups, unions and student centers, among other organizations, was prohibited, adopting a statute that intended to have superiority over the National Constitution.

The years prior to that coup were intense and contradictory in politics and institutional life. At the same time as anti-democratic repression unfolded in countries of the region, against the backdrop of the triumphant Cuban Revolution, news arrived about the US military defeat in Vietnam and the social and scientific achievements of socialist countries. The following years brought to the scene the French May, the Cordobazo and figures such as Agustín Tosco and Che, as some of the examples that restore significant epochal events, all of great impact on the educational contents of the icufist task.

It was also a time of renewal of those responsible for educational activities both in Buenos Aires and in the provinces in which the institutions functioned. They begin to occupy positions of responsibility - replacing mostly migrant volunteer activists - social science professionals²⁵ in a double game. On the one hand, people who graduated from ‘new’ university degrees²⁶ seek workspaces in icufist pedagogical activities, mainly those dedicated to leisure and educational recreation and on the other, young people were invited to participate in these educational training offers from those same activities. From then on, a generation of educators who strengthened a theoretical and methodological renewal is recognized, which from its usual education incorporated the Makárenko and Freinet pedagogy, the contributions of Scholanovism, elements of Piagetian psychology, cultural sociology and national references (Imen, 2023).

The ICUF aimed to educate children, adolescents and young people by urging them to share the language of national forces and struggles and to adopt combative positions (Thesis, 1967). Life in democracy, the promise of socialism, the possibility of inhabiting a better world were vectors that while calling for deep ideological debates proposed to see beyond the institutions and address the whole of humanity. Internationalism and pacifism were contents and tools that would materialize the encounter between the institutional, ideologically valued, the national and the world as a whole, the advance towards the ‘new man’, which now also had academic foundations.

The concern for what was happening on the eve of the coup of 1966 - a direct antecedent of the one that later occurred in 1976 - was latent in the democratic forces as a whole and in the ICUF in particular. A few days before it took place, on June 18 and 19, 1966, the Fifth Interprovincial Conference met in Rosario, which in its resolutions proposed

[...] considering that the full validity of the constitution and democratic norms is fundamental for the development and progress of the Argentine people, its breach entails the restriction of all cultural activity, as well as the evident manifestation of totalitarian, racist and anti-Semitic groups and gangs, we express our support and desire that the country develops in respect of its democratic and institutional norms and we alert the Argentine people in general and the Israeli community in particular about the danger involved in the current attempts to breach it [...] We express our best wishes that peace be restored in Vietnam [...] and support the incorporation of activists into solidarity movements, as well as being part of the peace movement (Memorias, 1966, p. 2).

From this anticipatory document and the subsequent events, some issues that mark the methodological development of this research are as follows: the impossibility of access to documentation that facilitates historical reconstruction exercises from the disappearance and/or decision to destroy archives and libraries and the fact that, in many cases, it has been possible to restore information only by construction exercises from memories,

The testimonial becomes relevant by becoming, in many cases, the only source of approach to facts, dates, places, educational proposals and personal trajectories. On the other hand, 40 uninterrupted years of democracy were able to give shelter and care to scattered materials and allowed the tracing of private archives, presenting an opportunity for institutional restitution²⁷ and the formation of a documentary corpus with significant contributions to the recent history of education focused on recreation.

In June there is a military coup [...] In the ICUF institutions, restlessness and concern begin to be generated because rumors circulate that they could be closed, due to their relationship with the Communist Party [...]The Zumerland Colony was one of them. The pedagogical management together with its managers decide to review the facilities [...]There was a library with varied literature, with some books in Spanish but by Soviet authors, brochures, material for pedagogical use, magazines [...] The decision has been made: all that material is going to be buried, including the mimeograph [...] almost all the cultural legacy that the institution possessed. It is a heartbreaking moment [...] I had to participate to choose everything that could compromise the institution [...] In the moment of the "burial" I did not participate (Feld, 2024, author's quotation marks).

Permeable borders, once again, are a source of protection and the generation of contradictions. While, outside the icufist world, institutions collapsed and political and social conflict grew, inside it, life continued with an apparent ‘normality’ even if situations such as the one revealed in the testimony above had to be overcome.

The pedagogical proposals for children and adolescents continued to look at the experiences displayed in the socialist bloc, now with the Cuban pioneers as the closest reality, and in the contributions that came from abroad, from social psychology, cultural sociology, popular education, and that were amalgamated with the traditions of positivism, krausism, normalism, the new school, hygienism and psychoanalysis.

The icufist pedagogical ideas were sustained on every occasion that democracy and institutional functioning were attacked. As from its beginnings, the coexistence of children, the distancing of urban life and family homes in pursuit of autonomy, the concern to know the internal laws of the processes of nature and society, belonging to groups, caring for bodies, learning by doing, producing thinking, approaching classist and public good institutions, linking with needy social classes, claiming friendship and solidarity, committed aesthetic creation, incorporation into productive processes, were present in the foundations of the kindergarten activities, the few language schools that still functioned, children's clubs, holiday centers, adolescent summer camps, study trips, sports tournaments, artistic and cultural activities²⁸. For its support, in terms of ideological guarantee and also security, there was a special effort aimed at forming and consolidating their own and committed teaching teams.

My presence in the ICUF institutions [...] form a watercolor of happy tones in my life, a kind of refuge from a world that I imagined full of future, but in which each day went through situations of anguish and the political persecution of my people [...] This conscious entry into the icufist world occurred shortly after Fernando Nadra, my father, was released after almost two years imprisoned in the prisons of Arturo Frondizi's Plan Conintes, for being a communist and - according to the former president himself - at the request of the United States embassy [...] The familiar picture wasn't straightforward. He worried that the sweet boy he said goodbye before being arrested after intervening in a Round Table at the Faculty of Law (UBA) in solidarity with Cuba, had given way to a stranger with bad school grades, increasingly silent, and even recluse, without friends; locked alone with his adventure books, perhaps in search of a distant justice [...] I began a learning of values, which would also be part of my political militancy and that I keep until today [...] They were, it is true, values also shared in my family, but until then only exercised in our close bond [...] The return to our homes was also semi-group, although in my case to an address that I had to keep carefully secret [...] I remember the application of those principles of constant improvement in the daily task [...] that I had to abandon prematurely when the student struggles that opened the 1970s forced me to definitively tip the balance towards political militancy (Nadra, 2020).

In March 1973, Héctor Cámpora was elected president. The dictatorship tried to control the electoral process by excluding Peronism, but a front of political parties²⁹ rejected the conditions, demanding free elections without proscriptions, with the limitation that Juan Domingo Perón could be a candidate. Two months after his inauguration, Cámpora resigned and a new election was called, now without proscriptions. The winning slate was Juan Domingo Perón - María Estela Martinez de Perón, who after the death of her husband assumed the presidency with a notorious turn to the right wing but could not concretize her mandate interrupted by the coup d 'état of March 1976.

In those early years of the 1970s, it seemed that, with Allende's Chile and the return of Peronism with Héctor Cámpora, progressive government alternatives were beginning to take shape. The directions in the region soon changed with a rapid growth of state and para-state violence, coups and repressive coordination in the region through the Condor Plan. In the particular case of Argentina, the performance of the Triple A³⁰ was protected by the state apparatus while Chile and Uruguay, very close territorially, were already living under dictatorships.

The geographical proximity and differences in the times of the coups d 'état made Argentina a land of refuge for exiles and a space for generating solidarity and resistance actions.

Solidarity was something that we worked on from 4-year-olds [,,,] to the oldest of adolescent groups [...] And internationalism was also an issue that was present. First it was Uruguay and Chile that had the dictatorships before us. We even received our friends from the Zhitlovsky of Uruguay who naturally joined the institutions and was a strong militancy linked to this issue of solidarity [...] And at that time there was an important mobilization from the groups and from those of us who had this pedagogical work because, in reality, the issue of teaching in our institutions was always taken as a militant activity. That is why the whole issue of solidarity and internationalism was part of this form of militancy (Golzman, 2012).

The testimonies of those who were ‘benefited’ by the definitions and the solidarity gestures are eloquent and at the same time moving.

It was very difficult, because we were always settling down [...] One tended not to look for circles of unknown relationships, especially in a city, in an environment where practically no one was familiar. Then I had some relationship, from some people I had met in Uruguay, from the Zhitlovsky, which was a club of the progressive Jewish community where I attended, and which had its counterpart in Buenos Aires. Then I had a group of people there, I had a friend who integrated me with a group of people, with whom we sometimes went out on a Saturday, we got together, but later they were very important to save my skin. When I had to live in hiding in Buenos Aires, and then when I had to leave the country, because the organic ways of relating to the Argentine Communist Party practically did not work, what worked were those personal relationships that allowed me to hide and be sheltered in the time I had to be in Buenos Aires (Feldman, 2016).

In this context, the ICUF understood that it should update its modes of political intervention and in relation to pedagogical activities it made decisions both in the training of its teachers in the recreational areas, and in a set of solidarity actions with neighboring countries already under dictatorship.

In 1973 - during a brief period of democracy - the Central Directorate of Kinder Clubs³¹ proposed the redefinition of a teacher training plan, pointing out that a separation between the ideological and pedagogical lines had previously been erroneously proposed.

In the startup, the staff also experienced the dichotomy and the work with the children did not efficiently comply with the objectives and postulates of the ICUF. Therefore, we understand by: training: The education of the individual as a militant of the movement and in their specific role, having as a requirement permanent coherence at the two levels. Member of the movement: It implies their location in the institution and therefore in the movement (Ex.: Joven Club)³². Specific role: It implies their location in the structure of the KC [...] For their performance as a militant of the movement they need political training, while for their performance as a leader or teachers of K.C. they need political and pedagogical training³³ (Plan de capacitación, 1973, p. 1).

Having been able to access scattered materials currently provided for the training in their original versions, some unpublished, preserved by activists, was a significant finding.

Thus, it was possible to consult publications containing bibliographic syntheses in which Soviet authors such as Makarenko, Suchodolsky, Sujomlimsky, Argentines such as Anibal Ponce, Ruben Naranjo and Berta Braslavsky are highlighted along with French such as Didier Dumazedier and Henry Wallon, Poles such as Janusz Korczac, an extensive list of Latin Americans including Paulo Freire and the indispensable quotations of Karl Marx.

Among the contents addressed in the teacher trainings, those of man, society, work, social class, production, alienation and revolution stand out, with the influence of Soviet pedagogy. Also, the relationships between work and free time, leisure and pleasures.

The objectives oriented the constitution of participatory, committed, creative, questioning subjects, and immersed in the movement in which they are being trained, in the society in which they live and in national and international social struggles.

While the actions of the Triple A and the Condor Plan advanced, in the educational activities Soviet, Latin American and Argentine books were read, the lyrics of the songs that were sung took those of the Spanish republican resistance, some translations from Russian, Polish and Yiddish with a rhythm of march, the national and regional ‘progressive’ folklore and the topics selected as Centers of Interest to be addressed in the groups according to age - of social and political content - in turn were tools for the production of materials by both the teaching teams and the participants.

It was the kindergartens³⁴ developed between 1971 and 1974 that synthesized both in their planning and in their execution the ideology of the ICUF, going through a time that took from the end of the 1966 dictatorship, the transition to democracy, the hardening of the repressive situation and were discontinued before reaching a new coup in 1976.

In them, children between 10 and 12 years old, the teaching teams and directors who participated in the Kinder Clubs³⁵ met with the intention of sharing common issues, according to the planning of each year. The first took place on a day in the City of Buenos Aires, crossed by the euphoria produced by the popular government of Salvador Allende and the following three, during a full weekend in Zumerland Colony.

To return to them, forty years later, with the testimony of who was responsible for the general coordination, invited to review the purposes, the language used and, without a doubt, the context of carrying out.

I was totally moved and maybe I will drop a tear, as the tango says [...] This type of experience has a strong intuitive imprint. Only now, after many years, I can give a theoretical framework to each of these experiences [...]There is an axiom that I discovered long ago [...] you cannot transmit what is not contained and there are aspects of transmission, when you lead, when you are a leader, that cannot be transmitted if you do not contain them. And when I say containment I mean the visceral, not the cognitive [...] the most basic emotions, if they are not present you theorize them [...] and this image appears to me, because I have the record of the table and the place where this initial idea of a massive meeting of the older KC groups appeared but that did not have to be competitive. And it was really a headache of how to achieve the meeting without there being supporters or bands in favor of or against [...] This was the most concrete bet. And it was a headache until the idea of a cell³⁶ appeared in the coming and going [...] The kindergartner managed to transcend that great difficulty and when I remember it, I get excited again, my blood runs through the veins because of that insight that generated the cell [...] The cell was to build three by three, it was a whole process [...] (Moreno, 2012).

The fourth and last kindergarten had as its motto Solidarity with the peoples in struggle for peace - in this case Chile and Uruguay - and as its axis of work, the manufacture of toys that were sent clandestinely to children who lived with their mothers in captivity or who had one of their parents imprisoned or exiled.

We had invited a Uruguayan and a Chilean to talk in the campfires and answer questions [...] It was the last politicized activity that could be done because the persecutions had already begun also in our country and then in March 1976 we also had a coup d 'état here in which such terrible events happened as those that happened in Chile and Uruguay (Poliacoff, 2010).

During these days, in addition, murals, sculptures, lyrics that remained ‘transparent’ during the 1976 dictatorship and then put in value with the recovery of democracy were produced and today constitute the material heritage of the institution and the recent history of education outside school. None of those toys could ever be restored materially or in a photo.

I remember the toys, that I do remember, the toys, in my case they were made of wood, I do not know if they were all made of wood [...]I remember that the concept of solidarity was a concept that transcended our line of work continuously [...] and I remember having worked hard on the difference between solidarity and charity (...) Solidarity is not to help and be present from outside or from a distance or from a position of superiority; but to share and participate [...] your solidarity. And also, as a learning that has to do with the round trip, that I am here, we are here, tomorrow we are there, which actually happened [...] In 1975 everything we did was seen as subversive and in fact it was in the strict term of the word subversive. We intended to subvert certain concepts of society [...] we did not theorize about solidarity but sought a way for one to commit themselves with the help of the other [...] (Schmilovich, 2012).

Time and the attention paid to other concerns ‘protected ’some material marks of that activity. One of them was a mural that survived almost abandoned for twenty-five years, which deteriorated until a group of children of the same age as its original authors, with their teachers, decided to intervene and recover it in 2010. After the last dictatorship, democracy raised agreements and controversies in relation to objects, symbols and positions. The silent presence and then the restoration made it become a commemorative and convening object to discuss trajectories, generational differences, ways of processing memories and adjudications of new meanings. In fact, some blurred figures were left blank as a way of recognizing the existence of the disappeared.

Another dictatorship, that of 1976 and change of scenarios and scripts

There was a political and social chronology that gave notice and a new coup d'état occurred on March 24, 1976. The signs became increasingly visible both for controlling situations in the face of persecution, and for the organization and care of activities, some with a tradition of decades that were debated between the need for self-defense and the continuity of their operation. Thus the educational proposals embodied in recreation, sport, theater reformulated actions and new borders with the purpose of survival and above all of resistance.

News about kidnappings, torture, murders and disappearances attributed to state and parastatal forces were increasingly taking place in part of public and societal opinion, particularly the progressive middle classes at the same time as the mechanisms of censorship and self-censorship (Carassai, 2013). Activism, militancy and discursive practices tried not to accept resignations.

The testimonies of teachers and activists of the ICUF institutions are in line with the ‘official’ statements that were not called to silence or evaded discrepancies and contradictions.

As a spokesman for the ideology, the magazine Tiempo stands out, which operated as the official organ of the ICUF between 1968 - after the six-day war - and 1987. During its existence, in addition to informing community debates, it reflected stances in the face of national political conflict (Kahan, 2021). A few days before the coup d 'état, it declared that

[...] it succumbed irrevocably. Sheltered in their lopezreguista self-sufficiency, they ignored the general clamor, discarded the recommendations of their own well-meaning supporters, rebuked and made threats against those from different angles of the national political spectrum, raised a constructive criticism of their government management, while the right-wing conspiracy brushed their floor. Inflation, the dearth of life, terrorism, and immorality had reached unbearable limits. The sanitation measures formulated by the Multiparty could not be taken into practice [...] In these precise circumstances, the armed forces assume the highest authority in the country to fill a notorious power vacuum [...] (Tiempo, 1976, p. 2)

All pedagogical and cultural activities were under strict control of the State. The ICUF ones were no exception to the threats. They continued their course with specific surveillance that committed volunteer activists who had to appear weekly before different police or military agencies, depending on the jurisdiction, prove identity, deliver affidavits regarding the activities, without having, especially in the early stages, a real dimension of the risks that these operations could entail.

When the military took power in 1976, the situation for camp activities was made very difficult by repressive actions [...] In order to do so, we had to present ourselves to the Federal Police in Mercedes, which was also home to an army barracks and a gendarmerie barracks, which carried out checks independently of the police. We had to declare at every moment that ours was a pedagogical activity, a recreational activity, and they said yes, but with one condition. The condition was that we had to go every week to declare for Mercedes, to "mark" the fingers and to declare [...] Well, always with fear, always with doubt, we did it, I did it (Kirzner, 2024, quotation marks added).

In the relations between the icufist inside - of which some examples are shown - and the outside - of which in the early times little was known - transgression was combined with rebellion, response with repulsion and also ambivalence with contradictions.

At the time of the dictatorship, between 1976 and 1982, I had to be a kindergarten teacher, I also teached teenagers, a kindergarten director and a holiday center director. And it was actually like being able to have a space where the dictatorship did not exist, it was like having a democratic space in which to move among the teachers, along with the children, along with the families [...]And the truth is that it was like an island where we kept singing the songs of the 1973 era, of Maria Elena Walsh, of Viglietti, of Mercedes Sosa and when we left there it was like we entered another world. So, it somehow preserved us (Golzman, 2024).

The willingness to support educational, recreational and cultural offerings forced us to review its functioning in the delicate tension between continuity and not giving up basic principles such as solidarity. Some examples are illustrative of these alternatives that put trajectory and responsiveness tension to new contexts. Among them, the outings of adolescents to free camps, which had already been going on for several years, could now be considered spaces for subversive training.

The Zumerland Colony had been organizing camps for its groups of adolescents in different parts of the country since 1970 [...] As a result of the events that have taken place since March (...) and with the little information that is known of clashes, arrests, disappearances, the institution decides that these camps should be held, for security reasons, in the vicinity of the center [...] The institution had to submit to the headquarters of the Army Corps based in the City of Mercedes a complete list of teachers and campers with the corresponding authorization of their parents because they are minors [...] (Feld, 2024).

Another paradigmatic case is the commemoration of April 19, the day in which the fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto are honored and, in them, all those who fought, died and survived the Nazi extermination attempt, Jews and non-Jews. It is an essential date in the icufist political and pedagogical calendar, from its beginnings until today, with a specific presence in the official school calendar³⁷. Every year, for decades, there has been a march in a reminder act³⁸ to transmit the legacy of the combatants, to denounce discriminatory and racist actions, to rescue pacifist and internationalist values with the historical slogans ‘peoples can ’, ‘peace is possible ’, ’[...] anti-fascist unity in time can save the world' (Ghetto de Varsovia..., 1982, p. 8). The political situation of 1975 prevented its realization for the only time in history. Less than a month before the coup d 'état of March 24, 1976, in the massive - and tense - act in a commercial theater, the official word of the ICUF in the voice of Ruben Sinay said

Last year we have not been able to publicly approach the burning memory of the ghetto fighters and the Jewish and multinational martyrs of the anti-fascist war. The Triple A's threats and the pusillanimity of a businessman also imprinted on the marble of the monument and the beloved tombstones, the seal of the ignominy that shamed our nation. It coincided with the omnimode and apparently immovable reign of a super minister who friendly talked with the stars while nimbly moving his fingers in the public treasures and in the guns of the underworld [...] (Speech Delivered by Rubén Sinay..., 1976, p. 1)³⁹.

The actions of denunciation were plotted with those of solidarity. More than forty years after those events and with the information of what happened, it is not possible to evade the questions because of risks and hazard awareness. It was no longer just a matter of guaranteeing the continuity of educational, recreational, cultural, sports activities. It was about safeguarding lives and at the same time responding to external fraternal demands, but not foreign ones.

The IFT theater - icon of the icufist cultural proposal - born as an ’appreciation’ theater, first in Yiddish and then in Spanish, followed the postulates of art theater, as an educational tool for training and mobilization of consciences and, like the other independent theaters of Buenos Aires and Argentina, also sought to meet the needs of the people (Ansaldo, 2021). The 1970s brought Chilean and Uruguayan popular artists already as exiles, or as migrants, who were banned or persecuted in their countries. For them, it was a scene for solidarity and protection purposes to solve militancy requirements.

The comrades of the Argentine Communist Party, who helped, helped us, for example with the IFT, which was the theater that was made available. They helped us look for the bombs when we had the threats, after the death of these comrades⁴⁰. The whole theater had to be checked. The proposal was as follows: I am the artist⁴¹, you are the representative, and María Cristina is the administrative one, but we can't have anyone else, do you agree? […] And all this in the IFT. And there was a long series of recitals, before and after the death of the comrades, and we worked that way. That was my first militant task [in Argentina] (Zitarrosa, 2015).

Solidarity went further. When the complaints about the violation of human rights brought Argentina to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in 1979, the ICUF gave the present. It was an opportunity to disseminate what was happening in relation to the disappearances of people and particularly Jews.

While the DAIA⁴² received, between January and August of that same year, letters from relatives of the disappeared requesting their intervention and in 1983, on the occasion of the realization of its territorial Convention, mothers of detainees-disappeared of Jewish origin asked for the commitment of the leaders to get involved with the directives of rescue with life and freedom, not only did it not make any linked statement, but it censured those from within the Jewish community, they reduced ranks with human rights organizations (Kahan, 2014).

The ICUF exposed itself to the risk of joining the long line that the families formed to file their complaints in a true act of courage. Angel Grushka and Julio Schverdfinger provided data on almost 800 Jews whose whereabouts were unknown. In the note addressed to the CIDH, it left

[...]record of the climate of fear and insecurity - which, like various sectors of the population - has overwhelmed numerous families and the social environment they frequent, in the face of an inexplicable and unrevealed succession of kidnappings, disappearances or illegal prisons of which members of our community have also been victims, whose legitimate action we are aware, without them being able to make use of the right to defense in court, or to be protected by justice, or to receive or establish communication with their relatives (Note addressed to the Commission..., 1979, p. 1)⁴³.

So far, and as examples, some of the signs, marks in the history and history of Argentine education, not only of changes in the functioning, imposed by the dictatorship but of actions of commitment to the foundational and prospective ideology of the ICUF, of coherence in the transmission, between ideology and actions, of resistance and also of assessments not always adjusted to the situations and even of contradictions.

Final remarks

The challenge of going through the pedagogical proposals that were unfolded in the icufist institutions during the last dictatorship - and also the previous one - and adding them to the discourse of the recent history of education has, beyond the aforementioned objective, the aim of including their actions and productions in the relational plot with the recent history of education, schooling and debates about leisure, free time and recreation. In particular, it recovers some meeting points between progressive and popular Jewish education in line with developments in Latin America⁴⁴, as well as taking up legacies that come from Europe⁴⁵.

The purpose of restoring ideological stances that were made visible in pedagogical actions - and analyzing some of them in detail - allowed us to observe revisions and theoretical and practical adaptations that were so much crossed by ignorance of the political situation, fears and concrete persecutions, as well as by political positions, explicit challenges and resistances.

The broad temporality that runs through exceeds the specific time of the facts analyzed. This allows to include explanatory background for some of the decisions made both in relation to teacher training and with the participation of children and adolescents.

For the ICUF and for the participants of its institutional activities, persecution, migrations, material and personal losses, and the family dismemberment of the 1970s were not new. The memory of resistance to anti-Semitism and other forms of injustice was available and, in many cases, it acted from memory as an anticipatory organizer of responses and, from action, in pedagogical proposals that assumed the present and projected futures from the training given.

The lack of archives to reconstruct conditions, acts and consequences generated, with democracy, opportunities to go beyond the borders of the information that was available and find in the narratives in memories and in carefully stored documents both descriptive and evaluative data. Beyond their speakers, the stories that were recovered were and are collective and constitute a dynamic heritage that revises with each incorporation both the past and the present and contributes to the restoration of information on the recent history of education outside school.

The protagonists never acted alone, they did so through sharing responsibilities, risks and above all convictions. On very few occasions they evaluated the possibility of dismantling activities. Instead, they bet on continuity, sometimes naive, incautious, risky.

The stories recovered are not all and, together with many others, they wove plots that are sometimes visible, sometimes invisible; sometimes coherent, sometimes contradictory; powerful and daring. They allowed the remaking of a cartography and a political and pedagogical temporality that includes the school, the recreational, the artistic, the sports, the social, the political, which is the way of conceiving education in the ICUF. It was in the course of a chronology that went through dictatorships, democracies and transitions and it is, as incomparable, in the marks left by authoritarianism, reviewed with the tools provided by democracy

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• Note:
  This article is part of the dossier 'Education in Times of the Dictatorship'.
• Peer review rounds:
  R1: two invitations; one report received.
  R2: two invitations; one report received.
• How to cite this article:
  Diamant, A. (2025). Between repression and resistance. Policies and pedagogy in the ICUF institutions during the last civic-military dictatorship (1976 - 1983). Revista Brasileira de História da Educação, 25, e372. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4025/rbhe.v25.2025.e372en
• Funding:
  The RBHE has financial support from the Brazilian Society of History of Education (SBHE) and the Editorial Program (Call No. 30/2023) of the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq).

• 1
  It was founded in Paris, in 1937, when the First World Congress of Jewish Culture was held. In Argentina in 1941 when there were already Jewish community institutions ideologically committed to cooperativism and the left-wing. Delegations from 23 countries participated in the congress, pointing out in their appeal that "[...] the present moment is deeply tragic in the life of the Jewish people. The dark forces of reaction and fascism, in their crusade against all the living progressive forces of the contemporary world, made the Jewish people the target of their particular attacks. The very existence of the Jewish people is threatened in several countries of the world” (Manifiesto, 1937). Argentina and Uruguay were represented by Pinie Katz (1881 - 1959), an intellectual militant who chaired the national ICUF since its creation.
• 2
  In 1937, the Argentine Organizing Committee Pro Sending a Delegate to the Congress of Culture in Paris was formed in Argentina. After its realization, it was proposed to found an Argentine-Jewish Cultural Federation in the country that would bring together secular Idishist institutions and create libraries, schools, theaters and other branches of cultural activity (Comité Provisorio para una Federación de la Cultura Judía en Argentina, 1937-1940).
• 3
  Yiddish, language and culture originating in Eastern Europe. It moved around the world because of migrations, especially due to ethnic persecution between the pre- and post-world wars in Europe. It was a first language for immigrants, also for the first generation of natives, especially in agricultural colonies where integration was more difficult than in urban areas. In the Monitor of Common Education there are references to the Yiddish teaching in the schools of the Jewish colonies of Entre Ríos since 1908. In the interwar period, Buenos Aires was considered one of the capitals of Yiddish literature and poetry.
• 4
  Human rights organizations report the number of 30,000 disappeared detainees. The number of Jews that make up that list is significant if we consider that the community represented 0.5 percent of the Argentine population while the disappeared of Jewish origin occupy 13%.
• 5
  In the Zumerland Colony, Mercedes, Province of Buenos Aires, the Forest of Memory is located with 41 trees, one for each missing person identified at the time of its inauguration in 2010. The task was carried out in conjunction with the groups HIJOS - Hijos e Hijas por la Identidad y la Justicia contra el Olvido y el Silencio (Sons and Daughters for Identity and Justice against Oblivion and Silence) and BROTHERS of disappeared detainees.
• 6
  Those persecuted were not necessarily persecuted because of their affiliation with the ICUF institutions, but because of their status as popular militants and for being Jews.
• 7
  In relation to the contributions to the recent history of education, the recomposition of temporary series of pedagogical planning, theoretical foundations for the justification of the activities and specific bibliography both national, Latin American and international stand out.
• 8
  In 2018, the ICUF created the CeDoB -Pinie Katz Documentation Center and Library- to rescue, preserve and transmit the history of the progressive Jewish movement in Argentina and the heritage of its federated institutions.
• 9
  The first trials of soldiers responsible for crimes against humanity were held between April and December 1985, during the government of Raúl Alfonsín. In 1986 the laws of Punto Final were sanctioned and in 1987 those of Obediencia Debida with the purpose of preventing the advancement of the causes. Between 1989 and 1990, during the government of Carlos Menem, soldiers who had been convicted were pardoned. Between 2001 and 2003, the impunity laws passed in 1986 and 1987 were legally annulled. In 2003, since the arrival of Néstor Kirchner to the presidency, state policies in relation to the claims of memory, truth and justice are deepened, reopening the trials.
• 10
  It refers to the disappearance of Mario, brother of the witness, kidnapped at the age of 21. He participated in the recreational activities of the ICUF during his childhood and adolescence.
• 11
  Of obligatory reading, it was distributed to all the educational establishments of the country, with the purpose of eradicating subversion, stimulating the teachers in the denunciation and installing the concepts of enemy, infiltration, war, among others.
• 12
  Institutional sports teams participating in provincial and national leagues, mainly volleyball, basketball and table tennis and their own events such as the Icufiadas, Olympics that brought together teams from all institutions in Argentina, Uruguay and sometimes Brazil.
• 13
  The IFT - Ídisher Folks Teater - Argentine independent theater in Yiddish was created in 1938. Its predecessor was the IDRAMST -Ídishe Dramatishe Stude- founded in 1932. Its objectives were to stage shows that responded to the needs of a specific audience, then in Yiddish, to raise and modernize the level of Jewish theater in Buenos Aires and to present works with social content and establish a company of Argentine Jewish actors. Highlights include Cipe Linkovsky, Jordana Fain, Marta Gam, Horacio Finder, Meme Wigo, Manolo Iedvabni. Until the 1950s, the performances were only in Yiddish. Then productions in Spanish and non-Jewish cast were incorporated (Ansaldo, 2021).
• 14
  Children's clubs, spaces for teenagers, holiday centers, camps. Children's clubs, spaces for teenagers, holiday centers, camps.
• 15
  Resident centers in Warsaw, Khmelnik, Grodno, Galicia, Vilnius among others. They maintained their traditions, culture, gastronomy and variants of the Yiddish language.
• 16
  Jewish Education Committee that from AMIA - Argentine Israelite Mutual Association - acted on the Jewish school network. By then the ICUF had been expelled and nucleated its schools in the Shul Rat.
• 17
  Liberal policies during the presidency of Carlos Menem.
• 18
  Political, economic, financial, social and institutional crisis that led to the resignation of President Fernando de la Rúa.
• 19
  The Botwin Brigade, made up of Jewish fighters. Its name recalls a Polish Jew, Naftali Botwin, murdered by Polish police in 1925.
• 20
  Social Service for the Care of Communist Prisoners, created by the Communist International in 1922.
• 21
  Movement to help allied armies in the fight against Nazism.
• 22
  It is possible to find signs that affected the functioning of Judeo-progressive organizations in the southern cone during times of simultaneous dictatorships and from the operations of the Condor Plan in Montevideo, Uruguay as well as in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
• 23
  In addition to the foundation of institutions mentioned in this paper, credit, production and consumption cooperatives, health care mutuals and networks of relationships between institutions in the region stand out.
• 24
  In 1930, Hipólito Irigoyen was overthrown and José Félix Uriburu took over. The so-called Infamous Decade begins. In 1943, Ramón Castillo was overthrown, and Arturo Rawson took over, followed by Pedro Ramírez and Edelmiro Farrel. In 1955, Juan Domingo Perón was overthrown, and Eduardo Lonardi took over. It is mentioned as a Liberating Revolution by its promoters and as a Rifle Revolution by its opponents. In 1962, Arturo Frondizi was overthrown. José María Guido takes over and swears before the Supreme Court of Justice, without the presence of military personnel.
• 25
  As an example, two cases are cited: Abraham (Pepe) Pain. Buenos Aires 1929 - Paris 2004. Teacher between 1954 and 1955 and director of the Zumerland Colony between 1956 and 1969, responsible for the professional pedagogical transformation of the activity. Previously, he was a school teacher at the I. L. Peretz School in Villa Lynch. Graduated from the Pedagogy Degree in the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the UBA. He migrated to Paris in 1976. After his death the family donated their personal library to Zumerland Colony. In an interview conducted in 1999 he recalls "In season 54 - 55 I go to the colony as a teacher [...] In the balance meeting there was a debate What should the colony be? We, the young people, as always, fighters, argued that a colony program had to be done and, as was customary in the ICUF at that time, a commission was appointed. He worked throughout the winter and we developed a first colony program with general objectives and topics by groups" (Pain, 2000). Dina Minster. Kovno, Lithuania 1935 - Buenos Aires 2019. She dropped out of high school at age 16 to work as a caretaker, a children's entertainer, and finally a teacher at the I. L. Peretz School Kindergarten in Villa Lynch. She did until the age 22 and entered the recently created Psychology Degree in the Faculty of Psychology of the UBA in 1958. In the meantime she was Pepe Pain's assistant director at Zumerland Colony. In 1961 she made the decision to participate in a contingent that traveled to Cuba to support the revolution, due to her relationship with the Argentine Communist Party from her connection with Dr. Jorge Thenon, a psychiatrist. In an interview in 2019, she stated that "[...] although she was not yet a psychologist, she had the fantasy that with Zumerland's background and experience she would be able to work with orphan children" (Minster, 2019).
• 26
  In relation to the creation in several national universities of careers in Education, Psychology, Sociology, Anthropology and the graduation of first graduates.
• 27
  See reference to CeDoB in footnote 4.
• 28
  The congruence of proposals between children's clubs and holiday centers Zumerland, Argentina, Kinderland, Brazil; Kindervelt, Uruguay is highlighted.
• 29
  The People's Hour, a grouping of political parties that pressured the military dictatorship to establish an electoral exit without proscriptions. Representatives of the Radical Civic Union of the People and the Peronist, Socialist, Popular Conservative and Bloquist parties, among others, participated.
• 30
  Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance.
• 31
  Central Management of Kinder Club, coordination of recreational activities developed in children's clubs. The management teams of the institutions of the Federal Capital and the Province of Buenos Aires participated.
• 32
  High school youth club. They generally shared that activity with the militancy in the Student Centers, in the Communist Youth Federation and in a smaller number they were linked to Peronist groups and armed groups.
• 33
  Organized into five chapters. 1- Redefinition of the concept of training. 2- Organization of the training. 3- Personnel in charge of the training. 4- Contents and Methodology. 5- Development of the training for 1973.
• 34
  Meeting of all the older groups of the kinderclubs.
• 35
  The kinderclubs of I. L. Peretz de Villa Lynch, I. L. Peretz de Lanús, the Israelite Center of Ramos Mejía, the Mendele Cultural Home in San Martín and in the Federal Capital, the Jaim Zhitlovsky Cultural, Sports and School Association and the Scholem Aleijem Cultural and Sports Association, the Cultural, Educational and Recreational Association - CER - of Buenos Aires, and the Emanuel Ringuelblum Israelite Cultural Center operated in the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Area.
• 36
  The cell was a group of three children belonging to the same institution. It would join with others from different backgrounds to form sports teams and avoid competition between institutions. It is significant for that time the use of this way of nominating groups, used in guerrilla and clandestine organizations.
• 37
  In 2000, the date was incorporated into the school calendar as the Day of Coexistence in Cultural Diversity, as a contribution from schools to the construction of a society without discrimination or xenophobia, highlighting the value of diversity in democratic life.
• 38
  In 2023, on the 80th anniversary, it was an international event. In Argentina it was carried out in several provinces and in Buenos Aires the headquarters was the Ministry of Education of the Nation.
• 39
  Document recovered in 2023.
• 40
  Raúl Feldman murdered by Triple A on December 24, 1974 at the headquarters of MAASLA and Manuel Liberoff disappeared on May 19, 1976 at his home.
• 41
  Alfredo Zitarrosa (1936 - 1989) considered one of the most outstanding figures of popular music in Uruguay and throughout Latin America. Exiled in Buenos Aires since 1973. Then he moved to Mexico and Spain.
• 42
  Delegation of Argentine Israeli Associations
• 43
  Document recovered in 2024.
• 44
  In addition to the national productions, the contributions of the pioneers in revolutionary Cuba, of Paulo Freire from Brazil, of the experience of Popular Unity in Chile are reviewed.
• 45
  In particular of Soviet pedagogy and psychology and the experiences unfolded under the tutelage of Janusz Korczak.

• Responsible editors:
  Eduardo Lautaro Galak (UNLP, Argentina)
  E-mail: [e-mail]
  https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0684-121X
  Elizabeth Figueiredo Sá (UFMT)
  E-mail: [e-mail]
  https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5861-7535
  Rosa Fátima de Souza Chaloba (Unesp)
  E-mail: [e-mail]
  https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3905-7317

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  16 June 2025
• Date of issue
  2025

History

• Received
  26 June 2024
• Accepted
  23 Jan 2025
• Published
  01 May 2025