Oct. 26 (Bloomberg) -- Diana Wang, a Polish-born Jew, entered Argentina as a Catholic in 1947 and remained one for 58 years, at least in the nation's immigration registry.

The 60-year-old daughter of Holocaust survivors plans to pick up an Interior Ministry document next week that sets the record straight.

Wang is part of Argentina's 200,000-person Jewish community -- the largest in Latin America -- which received an apology from President Nestor Kirchner's government in June for a secret 1938 order barring Jewish immigrants from Argentina.

``This is about principles, it's about living according to the law,'' said Wang, who led the effort to open the registry as head of ``Generations of the Shoa,'' or Holocaust. ``It's about not having to conceal our identity.''

Kirchner's apology and annulment of the order are part of an effort to address human rights concerns. Revising immigration records has symbolic value in Argentina, a country that welcomed Nazi fugitives after World War II while excluding Jews, said Sergio Widder, Latin America representative for the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

The registry had no practical effect on immigrants who did get in because Argentina never used religious identification for any other purpose, Widder said.

Even so, Foreign Minister Rafael Bielsa, when issuing the apology, said ``this was necessary to repair a grave injustice and a historic error in Argentina.''

`Lord's Prayer'

To be sure, countries throughout the Americas, including the U.S. and Canada, had restrictive policies on Jewish immigration, according to Jeffrey Lesser, director of Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Emory University in Atlanta. Brazil under the Vargas government in the 1940s, had a policy similar to Argentina's.

Still, thousands of Jewish refugees from Europe managed to enter Argentina.

Irene Dab, 70, a survivor of the Warsaw ghetto, said she was asked to recite the Roman Catholic ``Lord's Prayer'' at the Argentine Embassy in France in 1948 as her parents sought visas to go to Argentina. The embassy also exacted her family a payment for the visa, saying it was needed to circumvent the restriction set by the secret order.

``We eventually got the visas after relatives of mine paid for it,'' she said in a telephone interview.

Today Argentina's Jewish community is the fifth-biggest in the world, according to the Latin American Jewish Congress.

Among the nation's most prominent Jews was Jacobo Timerman, the onetime director of the La Opinion newspaper. In 1977, Argentina's military regime kidnapped, held and tortured Timerman for writing about the dictatorship's human rights violations, according to his 1981 book, ``Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number.''

Timerman, one of the few kidnapped political prisoners to reappear, was stripped of his citizenship and emigrated to Israel. He attributed his survival, in part, to pressure from Jewish groups in Argentina and the U.S. Timerman died in 1999.

Secret Order

The secret order in 1938, issued by then-Foreign Minister Jose Cantilo, was unearthed in 1998 by historian Beatriz Gurevich at the country's embassy in Stockholm, after she failed to find it in Argentina.

Gurevich learned of the document from journalist Uki Goni, who remembered as a youngster in the 1960s hearing family discussions about Argentina's policy of excluding Jewish immigrants. Goni's grandfather was an Argentine diplomat during the 1930s and 1940s in Vienna and Genoa.

``This to me is a state secret that became a family secret,'' said Goni, 52, who said his grandfather carried out the policy as a consul during World War II. Goni disclosed the secret order publicly for the first time in his 2002 book `The Real Odessa,' which chronicled how ex-Nazis came to Argentina.

Nazi Fugitives

Nazis who fled to Argentina include Dr. Josef Mengele, who conducted racial experiments on inmates at the Auschwitz concentration camp. The best known fugitive was Adolf Eichmann, the head of the Gestapo's Jewish department, which sent millions to Nazi camps. Israeli agents seized him in Argentina and took him to Israel, where he was convicted of mass murder and executed on May 31, 1961.

Goni and the Wiesenthal Center asked the previous government to acknowledge the secret order, Goni said. He tried again with the new government, urging Bielsa in an April 21 letter to annul the order and open the registry. It would be ``a minimum gesture of reparation for all the deaths that resulted from its enforcement, by my grandfather and so many other officials of the foreign service in that time,'' he said.

Wang's request to revise the Catholic designation that her mother gave authorities when they arrived was approved by the Foreign Ministry and a copy was handed to her Sept. 19.

She decided to wait to pick up a copy of her new document until this month to mark the beginning of the Jewish New Year 5766.

To contact the reporter on this story: Daniel Helft at dhelft@bloomberg.net