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Argentina’s major Jewish institutions boycotted the country’s official Holocaust Memorial Day ceremony this week to protest the death of AMIA prosecutor Alberto Nisman.
Leaders of AMIA, DAIA, the Holocaust Museum of Buenos Aires, the Argentine Zionist Organization and the Simon Wiesenthal Center did not participate in the government-organized event on Jan. 27.
The organizations held their own Holocaust memorial ceremony at the rebuilt AMIA Jewish center in Buenos Aires that morning instead. Several officials who asked not to be identified cited Nisman’s suspicious death on Jan. 18 and the information in his 300-page criminal complaint as reasons for boycotting the official ceremony.
The Latin American representative of the Wiesenthal Center, Sergio Widder, said, “We join the decision of the other Jewish NGOs in this sensitive moment. We want to send a message to the government, a message that there is a bad mood these days, that we are further than ever from the possibility of finding truth and justice in the AMIA case.”
According to Nisman’s complaint, Argentina’s government signed a deal with Iran to hide Iran’s role in the 1994 AMIA bombing in exchange for commercial and oil benefits. The complaint says President Cristina de Fernandez Kirchner and Foreign Minister Héctor Timerman “took the criminal decision of inventing Iran’s innocence to satisfy commercial, political and geopolitical interests of the Argentine republic.”
Nisman, who led the bombing probe for a decade, was found dead in his apartment of a gunshot wound just hours before he was to testify at the National Congress.
On Jan. 21, 3,000 people attended a protest at the rebuilt AMIA headquarters, officials reported. At the rally, protesters demanded “truth and justice” from the government. When DAIA president Julio Schlosser noted that 85 people had been killed in the AMIA attack, some in the crowd shouted “86,” a reference to Nisman. The number 86 has become shorthand on social media to refer to Nisman’s death. No one from the government or the ruling parties attended the Buenos Aires rally.
In Israel, 250 Argentine Jews, including a woman who identified herself as Nisman’s cousin, attended a Jan. 23 protest at the Argentine Embassy in Tel Aviv. Several held placards in Spanish reading “I am Nisman,” mirroring the French “I am Charlie” placards for the victims of the Charlie Hebdo magazine massacre in Paris. — jta