Three hundred trucks carried the rubble of the building of the Argentine Israelite Mutual Association (AMIA) after the terrorist attack of July 18, 1994, the worst in the history of the country, towards the Buenos Aires waterfront, but the Río de la Plata returned two 3-ton stones.
This witness to the tragedy receives visitors to the exhibition 'Shared Failure', which opens this Thursday at the Jewish Museum in the Argentine capital.
One of them corresponds to the tip of AMIA's initial, and the artist who found it, Marcelo Brodsky, marked the piece in red on a black and white archive photo of the original facade.
"It seemed essential to us to have them (the stones) in the exhibition because it is like a talisman, it is like having the witness who experienced this explosion firsthand," explains Florencia Giordana Braun, director of the Rolf Art gallery, where in 2019, at the As part of the 25th anniversary of the attack on the AMIA, this exhibition was created, which brings together ten Latin American artists who have worked on memory.
«Marcelo makes this reflection of saying that the river brought back his memory of what the attack was like. And he brought a 3-ton stone to the shore, which is, neither more nor less, the front of the facade », highlights Braun, and adds: «He finds these stones (…) like something that the water cannot even process » .
For the 30th anniversary of the attack, curator Nicole Moises restored that exhibition in the museum next to the Libertad Temple, which has a wall honoring the 85 dead and 300 injured in the attack.
"We hope for a recurring audience, who will return and who will be invited to reflect on these traumatic events that we experienced in the history of the Jewish community, but also of the Argentine community in general," says Moises.
Impunity
The attack perpetrated in 1994 - two years after the attack against the Israeli Embassy, which caused 22 deaths - remains unpunished; a debt owed by the Argentine Justice, which considers that the attack responded to a political decision by Iran, carried out by the terrorist organization Hezbollah.
Buenos Aires became "the capital of impunity," says Sergio Bergman, rabbi emeritus of the Templo Libertad and president of the World Union for Progressive Judaism, because, he points out, In Argentina there were no consequences and the victims "die twice", on the day of the attack and every year in which there is no justice.
On another wall, the work of Chilean artist Voluspa Jarpa speaks of the thousands of unresolved classified documents and the lack of justice; In front of it, the absence of the victims beats through the portraits of the relatives and the objects that were in contact with the deceased in their last hours, the work of Santiago Porter, who covered the massacre as a photojournalist.
For Bergman, the anniversary of the attack is "an icon" and must be "transversal."
"It is no use inscribing AMIA to a locality or an identity, but to understand it as a challenge for all of humanity," says the rabbi, who points out that the current positioning of Iran, Russia and China is "a challenge" on the agenda. global.
Again
This anniversary comes amid the resurgence of anti-Semitism, following Hamas's attack on Israel on October 7, 2023 and the subsequent war in Gaza: "The global Jewish community has run out of the 'Shoa' (Holocaust) waiver," says Bergman.
The rabbi considers that Argentina "is not an anti-Semitic country", as shown by the alignment of the president, Javier Milei, with Israel.
But there is "fear" and "a state of constant alert": "I have to be careful when doing my religious activities" because "it can happen again at any time," Moises is sincere.
The curator of the exhibition shares the "sense of identity" when reviewing history, because as a Jew she could have suffered the Holocaust in 1944, the attack on the AMIA or the attack on October 7, which is why she values the "memory" and "making memory count" in this exhibition that will remain open until December 20.
Verónica Dalto of Efe contributed to this Aurora article.