Justice to the bone

Marcelo Polakoff*

It’s not even a metaphor. It is scandalously real, since today a man or a woman around 47 years old lives on this planet who does not know –and perhaps does not even suspect– that the remains of their mother murdered by the dictatorship in 1976 are buried in the Jewish cemetery of Córdoba .

Last week I had to accompany as a rabbi the exhumation of the body of Mónica Roxana Chertkoff, of blessed memory, ordered by a federal court in order to take DNA samples that allow, in the near future, to be contrasted with the filiation data that The Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo and the National Genetic Data Bank have in their archives.

Everything suggests that, while she was kidnapped for eight months in La Perla, Mónica – barely 17 years old – had her baby in captivity, one more of the thousands of creatures cowardly stolen from her parents and her identity.

The respectful care that the staff at our cemetery, the officials present, and the forensic specialist devoted to each of her bones contrasted cruelly with the certain torture to which her executioners had subjected her.

There are thousands of graves in the cemetery, but that name was familiar to me. I checked my cell phone and found a book in digital format that we had published in 2006, 30 years following the coup, with which we were able to rescue the stories of the disappeared from the Jewish community in Cordoba.

When I got to Monica’s pages, I tried in vain to hide my tears: there was the sweetest and most forceful proof of the existence of her child. It was a poem of his and we read it – with a broken voice – before the remains of it. Among her paragraphs, she exclaims: “Go on, dream, little one, that even in my bowels there is no danger… Go on, my arms impatiently await your arrival, I feel very alone in front of an empty cradle and caressing the cocoons it seems to me that you I play”.

The Hebrew prayer that we usually recite for the memory of our loved ones (and we did so for Monica) says: “We will do acts of justice in favor of the memory of her soul.” Just a few days ago, on that warm summer morning, we delivered. We touch his bones and caress his soul. We approach the reunion. It will be justice. Amen.

* Rabbi