Paul Armony, president of Asociación de Genealogía Judía de Argentina (Association of Jewish Genealogy of Argentina), died in Buenos Aires on October 24, 2008, after a battle with acute leukemia. Armony was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, in 1932. His father, Joseph Kestenbojm, had left the Volhynia region in Poland in the mid-1920s, and, after spending a few years in Israel—where he adopted a Hebrew surname—settled in Uruguay and married Fanny Mariñansky, the daughter of Russian immigrants from Bessarabia.
In 1943, the family moved to Argentina. At an early age, Paul took on many domestic responsibilities because of his mother’s failing health and his family’s economic difficulties and later worked after school hours at the family’s small shop. After graduating from the University of Buenos Aires as a civil engineer, he married Eva Fried, the daughter of Polish immigrants from Galicia. Paul started a long and successful career in the construction business and later in international trade, while keeping for many years a part-time appointment as a mathematics professor at Argentina’s National Technological University.
Paul’s real passion was social history, and he was particularly fascinated by the links among personal experiences, family stories and historical events. Although he grew up in a secular home, he was very attached to his Jewish heritage, in part because he remained deeply affected by the anti-Semitism and xenophobic nationalism that he experienced as a child in Argentina. He never forgot, either, that his father’s entire family in Europe had been murdered by the Nazis and their Ukrainian collaborators. Paul strongly believed that family ties needed to be maintained, even across generations and continents, to ensure the continuity of the Jewish people.
Asociación de Genealogía Judía de Argentina
In 1996, Paul launched from his home the Asociación de Genealogía Judía de Argentina. To this end, he learned—mostly by himself—to build computerized databases, to use graphic and editing software and to make the most of the Internet. He retired in 1998 and gave his full time to genealogical research and dissemination. Along with his wife and a group of associates, Paul set out to discover, copy, digitize and classify hundreds of thousands of archival records from Jewish cemeteries in Argentina. Many of those rec-ords were on the verge of being lost or had remained unknown or forlorn for decades. Such a task was all the more significant after the terrorist bombing of the central Jewish community building in Buenos Aires in 1994. Jewish genealogists became instrumental in the painstaking reconstruction of the records that were held in the destroyed building.
Paul’s commitment also extended to organizing public seminars and school workshops, as well as answering numerous e-mail and phone inquiries from Argentina and abroad. He still found time to investigate his own family history and to keep in constant touch with his friends and relatives around the world, including his three sons, who pursued academic careers in North America. Paul’s outstanding dedication was recognized in many ways. He was particularly proud of the Excellence Prize he received from the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies for his job as editor-in-chief of Toldot and of the Medal of Honor that the Senate of the Argentine Republic conferred on him. This award was to acknowledge his contribution to the Israel-Argentina relations as the former manager of the Argentina-Israel Chamber of Commerce and as the founding president of the Association for Jewish Genealogy in Argentina.
Since the early 1990s, Paul and Eva traveled regularly to Canada and made long sojourns in Montreal, where two of their sons live.
Abraham Lichtenbaum, director of the IWO Foundation in Argentina, said to the Jewish News Agency that “in the ten or twelve past years, Armony did something that was missing: a silent work that will be beneficial to future generations.” Clarín, the most widely read newspaper in Argentina, published a full-page piece on his legacy, stating that “it is certain that he opened up the field for the development of genealogical studies in this country, with a scientific basis.” Paul is survived by his wife Eva, his sons Ariel, Victor and Jorge, and his grandchildren Ian, Alan, Emma and Alex.
Victor Armony, son of Paul Armony, lives in Montreal.
