July 18: Attack on the Argentine Jewish Community

Eighty-five people were killed and more than 200 were wounded when the Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires, Argentina was decimated by a bomb on this date in 1994. Two years previously, the Israeli Embassy in the city had been bombed, with 29 deaths. Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility for that bombing, and Hezbollah has been accused of the community center bombing, with Iranian sponsorship and local assistance — but no chain of responsibility was definitively established by Argentine prosecutors, even with the help of the Israeli Mossad and the FBI. President Nestor Kirchner has called this failure a “national disgrace,” while his predecessor, Carlos Medem, was accused of accepting $10 million from Iran to block the investigation. As of 2007, there were INTERPOL arrest warrants out for several Iranian poliical leaders, including former President Rasanjani, and for members of an Islamic Marxist organization, the People’s Mujahedin. Iran’s leaders have dismissed the charges as “a Zionist plot.”

“The government always treated it as just the Jews’ problem, not the entire country’s problem. ‘Never again’ is what I tell myself.” —Mirta Lipzsyc, Latin American Jewish Association