Thirty-three years after the attack, Israeli representatives and Cabinet members participated in a moving ceremony in tribute to the victims. The appeal to the Supreme Court, hope for a trial in absentia, and a call for the release of those held hostage by Hamas were highlighted.
Just days after the celebration of Purim, the traditional holiday commemorating a historic victory of the Jewish people against antisemitism, national authorities, community members, artists, survivors, and families of victims gathered to commemorate the anniversary of the bombing of the Israeli Embassy, the first terrorist attack in Argentina.
During the day, there were repeated calls to the Supreme Court of Justice to condemn those responsible, expectations for the new law on trial in absentia and calls for the release of those still held hostage by Hamas.
As every year, at 14:51 p.m. on March 17, the siren sounded in commemoration of the exact moment in 1992 when the terrible attack took place, leaving 29 dead and hundreds injured, yet still going unpunished.
Representing the Government were the Secretary General of the Presidency, Karina Milei, and the Ministers of Foreign Affairs, Gerard Werthein; defense, Louis Petri; of Security, Patricia Bullrich, of Health, Mario Lugones, and Justice, Mariano Cúneo Libarona.
Also participating were the Head of Government of the City of Buenos Aires, Jorge Macri, several deputies and legislators from PRO and other parties - such as Sabrina Ajmechet and Pilar Ramírez– and the Secretary of Culture of the Nation, Leonardo Cifelli.
After the siren sounded, a singer performed the Argentine and Israeli national anthems, and the names of the victims of that attack were read out, after which the audience responded with a "present."
After this, the rabbi Isaac Sacca said a prayer, while the Archbishop of Buenos Aires, Jorge García Cuerva, he made a Catholic prayer, highlighting the multi-religious nature of the deceased.
When it was time to lay the floral offerings in honor of the victims, Karina Milei and Werthein, representing the Argentine State, approached a wreath located to the side of the main stage.
Representing the State of Israel, those in charge of this task were Daniel Dayan (President of Yad Vashem and President of IHRA (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance) for the period 2025) and the Israeli Ambassador to Buenos Aires, Eyal Sela.
By the City Government, they were Jorge Macri and its general secretary, Fulvio Pompeo, while on behalf of the families and survivors, she was the president of the Jewish Joint Committee (Jewish Joint Committee), Annie Sandler.
On behalf of the defense and security forces of Israel and Argentina, the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff did so, xavier isaac; the Military Attaché, Colonel Amit Guy, and the deputy head of security at the Israeli Foreign Ministry.
On behalf of the Argentine Jewish community, the offering was presented by the presidents of AMIA and DAIA, Amos Linetzky y Mauro Berenstein, respectively, and finally, representatives from Israeli organizations in Argentina (members of KKL and Keren Hayesod) approached.
All of them were accompanied by survivors of the 1992 attack and relatives of the victims, both from that attack and the one carried out by Hamas on October 7, 2023, in the Gaza Strip, which was also commemorated during the event.
On the site, for example, was the grandson of Yitzhak Shefi, who was the Israeli ambassador in Buenos Aires on the day of the terrorist attack and who arrived in the city to participate in the event.
Hope for the new law on trial in absentia and gratitude to President Javier Milei
One of the last to speak was Ambassador Sela, who highlighted a speech by the President Javier Milei in which he “spoke of the importance of, in the face of barbarism, standing on the right side of history.”
In addition, the diplomat told a heartbreaking story that he learned about a few days ago, that of Ralph Goldman, an American soldier who in 1945 helped Jews who survived the Holocaust in Germany.
The son of that soldier who witnessed the horrors of Nazism firsthand, named David, was at the Embassy on March 17, 1992, and died as a result of the attack.
“Thank you very much, Mr. President, for this message. Please pass on my gratitude for being on the right side of history. And I want to dwell on the details of this statement. Standing on the right side of history does not depend on current events, politics, or the social climate. We are talking about profound, identity-based issues. We are talking about opposing the face of evil that Ralph knew and that David saw before taking his last breath,” he added.
Earlier, at the Casa Rosada, the president met with the new DAIA authorities, following Berenztein's inauguration as head of the DAIA, to discuss the event, as the president was unable to attend due to scheduling conflicts.
On the other hand, Sela celebrated the decision of the judge who is a member of the Federal Court of Criminal Cassation, Carlos Mahiques, to “indicate the responsibility of Iran and the terrorist action in the attacks against the Israeli Embassy and the AMIA.”
"Added to this significant development is the fact that a few days ago, the National Congress approved the bill for a trial in absentia. This instrument would allow progress in the cases of the attacks. We understand that this would enable the mechanisms, the judicial mechanisms that are currently blocked by the defendants' refusal to present themselves before the Argentine courts for proper trial," the diplomat emphasized.
On this point, he agreed with the former consul Martín Goldberg, one of the survivors of the attack on the Israeli headquarters, who was also one of the keynote speakers at the event.
“We were wounded and killed in this very place by an atrocious act of terrorism that struck without regard for nationality or religion. The same evil terrorism that massacred and kidnapped innocent civilians on October 7, 2023, in the State of Israel. We demand the immediate release of all those kidnapped."he exclaimed.
For his part, Foreign Minister Werthein lamented that "in some places around the world, people still don't fully understand who the terrorists are who commit these types of attacks and what they are capable of."
"When I have to talk about this, I have to remember some friends who also passed away in this embassy. I have to remember some collaborators. Martín must be somewhere around here, who fled and, thank God, was saved. May this never happen again in Argentina." Let us all join together to fight this fierce enemy of the world, terrorism, and hopefully we can all support this to end.“May God bless everyone,” he added.
Speaking to Infobae, Goldberg added that it is necessary to "continue demanding that the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation investigate this case, continue working."
“A few days ago, the Legislative Branch, together with the Executive Branch, passed a law that will allow those implicated as necessary participants in the attack to be tried in absentia, so there is hope for further progress. But it must be done. Our obligation as survivors and for the memory of the 29 people who cannot defend themselves is to continue working on this,” he said.
The event closed with a song by Axel in memory of the victims.
For his part, the head of AMIA emphasized after the ceremony that "the demand for justice and the exercise of memory" have accompanied the community "for life."
“Many of us were very young when it happened, and we still carry the trauma of the bomb, the trauma of the lack of answers, a trauma that hasn't subsided over the years because we can't even take comfort in knowing that there is justice and that those who committed the attack are paying for their actions. The same matrix of hatred, the same matrix of intolerance, will always be supporting all these groups behind the scenes. So we will not give up our demands and will continue until justice is done,” he concluded.
Photos: Screenshot from YouTube
Source: INFOBAE and Aurora
According to Catalan politician Pilar Rahola, she has no doubt that her friend, prosecutor Alberto Nisman, was murdered. Nisman, with whom she had spoken a few days earlier and expressed his satisfaction with the work concluded in the accusation against Cristina Kirchner for collusion with Iran, was murdered. There's likely a huge mess brewing over this issue, which affects the very structures of the state or Argentina's global image, with many, if not all, of the ideologies likely working to prevent it from being clarified. Or perhaps it's also due to corrupt patronage networks that always prefer that investigations never go too far, lest they implicate those who weren't expecting it. It is very complicated to understand how the intricacies of the state or society work in Argentina, even less so without being Argentine, but if there is a country that in cases of such crime and so much corruption is more than similar to Argentina, it is Spain, where the case of terrorism with a mess mounted in similar proportions could be the state terrorism of GAL, which occurred in the 80s during the first governments of the socialist party PSOE and judged in the 90s after a huge journalistic scandal directed by some of the most listened to right-wing media, the newspaper El Mundo and the radio station Antena 3, which day in and day out, for years, or decades, pounded the brains of right-wing and fascist Spaniards, plus the suckers who fell into their networks, throwing stones at their own roof, by denouncing state terrorism carried out by police, businessmen and mercenaries of their own, that is to say, fascists and neo-Nazis. If anything, it was possible to understand, minimally, why the terrorists made too many "mistakes" kidnapping and murdering completely innocent citizens with no connection to the Basque separatist group ETA, and for this reason perhaps the ultra-Catholics and the Opus Dei sect that also roamed around, especially on the Spanish Catholic Church's COPE radio station, a station that this sect then directed until it was apparently expelled a few years ago for allowing the dissemination of the crazy Judeo-Masonic conspiracies in the jihadist attacks of 11-M in 2004, did find some scruple or a good excuse.
But given the cynicism, or in some cases the nihilism, that these Spanish sectors display, always all more than corporatist or who would never in their lives denounce the crimes of “one of their own”, one could even assert that they only intended to mislead with the many previous fascist state terrorisms, in which Argentine, Italian, French and Portuguese fascists and neo-Nazis also collaborated, or above all they intended to overthrow what they considered the socialist regime of Felipe González, which according to these sectors was subjecting Spain to a process very similar to the communist regimes of Pol Pot, Ho Chi Minh or Stalin, not to mention the Judeo-Masonic conspiracies against socialist masons and their related businessmen, such as the famous PRISA Group, or RISA according to the joke they spread among the Spanish, which also ended up acquiring, by paying the owner with money, the radio station Antena 3, or its star journalist, Antonio Herrero, died in the corrupt Marbella of his friend Jesús Gil, still very young man in a diving accident, or a murder according to these sectors, and to make matters worse, the murder could well have been ordered by Aznar's first right-wing government, according to his replacement at COPE, the now even more famous Losantos. Or the journalist who first published the GAL (National Action Party) state terrorism report, Pedro J. Ramírez, was recorded on a hidden camera engaging in a strange masochistic sex act involving transvestism.
The GAL scandal, coupled with ongoing corruption scandals involving socialist politicians, was so significant that all political parties united against the PSOE. Even the Spanish communists, then in the United Left party, joined coalitions with their arch-enemies from the right-wing Popular Party. This, for example, was how they managed to oust the socialist Rodríguez Ibarra from the government of the Extremadura region. Incidentally, he was one of the few, if not the only, Socialist Party leader who publicly "almost" justified state terrorism in the name of a lofty objective for Spain.