01/02/2026
Renee Epelbaum lived a mother’s nightmare—and midwifed a movement for justice in Argentina.
In April 1976, scarcely a month after the military coup in Argetina that brought the junta to power, the Madres (“the Mothers”), originally 14 in number, began gathering at the Plaza in silent vigil. Mostly middle-aged and elderly women with no political background, the Madres risked their own lives to challenge the regime at a time when such courage was in very short supply. They wanted to know what happened to their children and grandchildren who were stolen from them.
Originally referred to as “las locas,” the crazy women, the Madres were often spat upon and insulted. Eleven parents of desaparecidos (“disappeared”) and two French nuns who were meeting with them were themselves abducted in December 1977. As public protest mounted after the defeat of Argentina in the Faulkland Islands war, the Madres were joined by hundreds of other Argentine citizens. The Madres thus became the midwives of a movement which contributed to the restoration of democracy in Argentina.
Renee Epelbaum is one of the founding leaders of the Madres. Her three children were kidnapped in 1977, she said. Luis, who had been a medical student concerned about his country’s poor, was kidnapped in August 1977, at the age of 25. The younger children—Claudio, then 23, and Lila, then 20, were abducted three months later from Uruguay (the security forces of the two countries cooperated in the battle against “subversion”). Their mother had sent them there in a vain attempt to try to ensure their safety.
In the beginning, she said, when people asked, “Were your children involved in anything?” she got angry because “This is a question of justice. Nobody should be kidnapped and made to disappear even if they were involved politically.”
Read Lilith’s 1986 cover story by Aviva Cantor about Epelbaum and the mothers’ movement to discover the fate of the 30,000 persons (about 3,000 of them Jews) abducted by the security forces during the 1976-83 reign of terror and still missing: https://buff.ly/fnPiBDv
