From ...........The New Republic

August 15, 1994

page 17

By Robert Weisbrot, Professor of American history at Colby College.

Author of The Jews of Argentina (Jewish Publication Society).

"Everybody was stunned. Nobody expected this horror," an Argentine Jewish woman said of the bombing in Buenos Aires on July 18, which killed about 100 people, wounded more than 200 and leveled a seven-story building that had anchored the nation's Jewish life for fifty years. [---------]

Anti-Semitic attitudes suffuse key sectors of the population, emanating from conservative, nationalist institutions of authority such as the military (which excludes Jews from the officer corps), police forces and elements of the Catholic Church.

While respected prelates and Catholic journals like Criterio condemn anti-Semitism as un-Christian, subtler prejudices remain, such as sermons that perpetuate the Jewish "Christ-killer" image.

Among many unbroken links between church and state is the nation's constitutional mandate that the president be a Catholic.

Economic resentments sharpen anti-Semitic feelings amid soaring inflation, sluggish productivity, a crippling foreign debt and harsh class conflict. When Jews first came to Argentina they were disdained as mere peddlers. Today, Jews successful in business are derided as nouveau riche. [--------] Most Jews seem convinced that the bombing was not simply a random tragedy of foreign origin, but the culmination of more than a half-century of anti-Semitic lawlessness in Argentina.

Their suspicions are deepened by the fact that the bomb exploded just after the regular meeting time of "Project Witness," a group that has documented the Argentine government's protection of more than 1,000 Nazis, including war criminals, since 1945. Only a chance postponement of the meeting spared the workers.

Still, Jews widely shared the cynical view of Jorge Halperin, a columnist writing in the journal Clarin, that Argentina offered a logical site for the bombing. "There is anti-Semitism in non-Islamic sectors, and weakness in the system of prevention and punishment." [--------] -END QUOTE-

From ......The New Republic 15 August, 1994 page 17

By Robert Weisbrot, Professor of American history at Colby College.

Author of The Jews of Argentina (Jewish Publication Society)

"Everybody was stunned. Nobody expected this horror," an Argentine Jewish woman said of the bombing in Buenos Aires on July 18, which killed about 100 people, wounded more than 200 and leveled a seven-story building that had anchored the nation's Jewish life for fifty years.

Ruben Ezra Beraja, president of a federation of 130 Jewish organizations that had shared the building with the Argentine Jewish Mutual Association, declared the bombing "the worst massacre of Jews in the Americas since the Colonial era." Still, for many of the estimated 300,000 Jews in Argentina, the shock was partly one of recognition: a reminder that their country has afforded them, at best, a precarious safety periodically broken by acts of terror.

At first blush, Argentines had much to lament but little to atone for. All evidence suggests that the bomb was planted by a foreign terrorist group, the Partisans of God, that had surfaced in Lebanon in April with a vow of "all-out war" against Israel. Many Argentine Christians, moreover, attended a July 21 rally of 150,000 organized by the Jewish community called "Standing Up to Terror." President Carlos Saul Menem also showed solidarity with his Jewish brothers after the bombing. "In [my] grief, I am also a victim," he declared, pledging every resource of his government and full investigative authority to agents of the Israeli Mossad and other foreign intelligence services. None of these apparently encouraging developments, however, could quite extinguish the bitter cynicism that overtook Jewish neighborhoods.

Many angrily recalled the car-bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires on March 17, 1992, in which thirty people died and more than 100 were seriously wounded. Following that attack, a foreign fundamentalist group, Islamic Holy War, claimed responsibility, and President Menem vowed to bring the murderers to justice, but the investigation led nowhere. Looking back on the embassy bombing, a young Jew takes little comfort from Menem's recent assurances:

The record of Argentine Jewish history gives these remarks a powerful and somber resonance. Jews have found Argentina an often generous but dangerously unstable host since they arrived in large numbers from Russia, Poland and other European countries in the late nineteenth century. These early immigrants enjoyed cultural freedom and the opportunity to rise in an expanding economy, first as workers in farm colonies and flourishing factories and later as skilled artisans, businessmen and professionals. Today their descendants comprise an educated and prosperous middle class in Argentine society. Yet at no time have they known the tolerance or physical security that would give full meaning to their other attainments.

Recurrent surges of bigotry and violence have often made Argentina seem less a haven for Jews than for anti-Semites. Synagogue bombings, swastikas desecrating Jewish cemeteries, shootings, kidnappings and well financed campaigns of slander and harassment have been among the recurring offenses.

The perpetrators have also varied, from hate-mongers parading military insignia to Nazi war criminals to guerrilla bands to garden-variety thugs. Argentina's volatile treatment of its Jews reflects its own divided character since winning independence from the Spanish empire in the early nineteenth century.

The country has forged democratic institutions and proclaimed a commitment to pluralism that befits its history of encouraging immigration. Yet authoritarian, nationalist and xenophobic traditions dating to Colonial times have proved equally tenacious, compounded by economic instability, military coups, government repression, armed insurgencies and acts of terror.

Jews have not been the sole or even the most numerous victims of these forces. But in a society suspicious of foreigners, Jews have always been the most suspect; in a land of vulnerable citizens, Jews have been by far the most vulnerable.

Economic resentments sharpen anti-Semitic feelings amid soaring inflation, sluggish productivity, a crippling foreign debt and harsh class conflict. When Jews first came to Argentina they were disdained as mere peddlers. Today, Jews successful in business are derided as nouveau riche. Extremist ideologies have crystallized the often nebulous hostility toward Jews into virulent stereotypes, anchored by cries of a Jewish Communist conspiracy against the Argentine state.

Such charges have the ring of legitimacy because a disproportionate number of the country's leftists, particularly Communists, have been Jewish, even though most Jews traditionally have supported democratic and anti-Communist candidates. As Jews have consolidated their position in the middle class, these charges have increasingly coexisted with warnings that they are the insidious agents of foreign bankers. Denunciations of "Zionist imperialism" have also given rabble-rousers on both ends of the political spectrum an effective euphemism for anti-Semitic ravings in a land where most professed Jews are Zionist.

In 1971 an extreme nationalist teaching at the University of Buenos Aires, Walter Beveraggi Allende, warned his Christian countrymen that Israeli soldiers aimed to seize the Southern third of Argentina and convert it into a new Jewish state to be called "Andinia." Recycled versions of this conspiracy theory continue to circulate widely. In January 1986, according to the Anti-Defamation League, the Buenos Aires daily La Nacion reported without qualification that hundreds of Jewish backpackers were combing Southern Argentina to study the climate, flora, fauna and potential resources in preparation for settlement by 10,000 "Israelis" within ten years.

Argentine authorities have largely been divided between those unable to halt anti-Semitic agitation and those unwilling to do so. During the government's "Dirty War" against leftist rebels in the late 1970s, when the military, the police and fascist groups worked closely to purge "undesirables," Jews made up an estimated 15 percent of the 9,000 desaparecidos - civilian suspects who were detained incommunicado and often tortured and killed.

Since the restoration of democracy in 1983 the Jewish community has received warm support from civilian leaders, but anti-Semitic violence and vandalism have continued unabated, including a gang beating of the country's leading rabbi in January.

The July 18 bombing may have been the single most demoralizing event in Argentine Jewish history, not just for the loss of life but also for the ravaging of Jewish collective memory. The Argentine Jewish Mutual Association, founded in 1894 as a burial society, had evolved into a cultural, educational and welfare organization, a unique documentary source for a century of Jewish communal life. The bombing obliterated its records, together with the largest collection of Judaica in South America; in all, some 70,000 books, magazines, paintings and archives were destroyed.

Most Jews seem convinced that the bombing was not simply a random tragedy of foreign origin, but the culmination of more than a half-century of anti-Semitic lawlessness in Argentina. Their suspicions are deepened by the fact that the bomb exploded just after the regular meeting time of "Project Witness," a group that has documented the Argentine government's protection of more than 1,000 Nazis, including war criminals, since 1945.

Only a chance postponement of the meeting spared the workers. Still, Jews widely shared the cynical view of Jorge Halperin, a columnist writing in the journal Clarin, that Argentina offered a logical site for the bombing. "There is anti-Semitism in non-Islamic sectors, and weakness in the system of prevention and punishment." Despite President Menem's valiant efforts to repair the damage, the barriers to a more secure Jewish community remain formidable. His request to the Mossad stems partly from Argentina's chronic failure in investigating and punishing antiSemitic attacks. The popular reaction to the bombing is also problematic; many Argentines voiced outrage on behalf of their Jewish countrymen, but others lamented only the deaths of Christian passers-by.

A worker stopped a young ticket salesman in Buenos Aires a day after the bombing and said bitterly, "A terrible tragedy." Then, unaware that the salesman was Jewish, he added "What good luck it was only the Jews!" In the wake of the bombing some Jews have vowed greater activism for Jewish rights, while others have resolved to leave Argentina (more than 75,000 have settled in Israel alone since 1948). If history is a guide, though, the great majority of Jews will continue to cope as best they can in a nation alternately welcoming and forbidding. And they will hope that Argentines may yet undertake, in the words of Rabbi Leon Klenicki, "a reckoning of the soul," to acknowledge and at last to purge that spirit of violence and intolerance that has stained the country's history. Otherwise, the Jews can expect no end to their ordeal but, at best, another fragile interlude .

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