José Ber Gelbard

José Ber Gelbard (14 April 1917 – 4 October 1977), was a Polish-born Argentine activist and politician, and a member of the Argentine Communist Party. He also helped organize the Confederación General Económica (CGE), made up of small and medium-sized business. Beginning about 1955, he was appointed as an economic advisor to Juan Perón and repeatedly was called back to serve as Minister of Finance to successive governments until the military coup of March 1976. He fled with his family shortly before the coup, gaining political asylum in the United States and settling in Washington, D.C.

Born Joseph Gelbard into a Jewish family in Radomsko, Poland, in 1917, his family emigrated in 1930 to Argentina. They settled in Tucumán, 800 mi (1,287 km) north of Buenos Aires. Other family were already there, as well as immigrant communities of Sephardic and European Jews, and Arabs from the Middle East (turcos). During the Great Depression, Gelbard helped support the family as a street peddler of men's ties and belts.

By 1938 Gelbard had saved some money and married Dina Haskel. They settled in Catamarca, where he started a men's clothing store named "Casa Nueva York". They had children together, including a son Fernando Gelbard. Fernando became a jazz pianist and flautist, composer and record producer. In 1974 he recorded Didi (named for his wife) with a five-man jazz group in Buenos Aires. Their music was ahead of its time in its combination of Latin and Afro-American music, bebop and bossa nova. The record was remastered and released in 2002.

Gelbard became a Communist activist, involved in several causes, including Jewish armed groups defending the Jewish community in Tucumán from the abuses of local Nazi groups. He joined the , a loose alliance against the populist candidate Juan Perón, during the 1945-46 electoral campaign.

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