Mortality, Vol. 12, No.

2, May 2007

Argentine space, Jewish memory: memorials

to the blown apart and disappeared in Buenos Aires
EDNA AIZENBERG
Marymount Manhattan College, New York, USA

ABSTRACT This paper traces a new memory map for Latin America, a map anchored in
contemporary events not in pre-Columbian monuments. This paper will focus on Buenos Aires where a
painful twentieth-century history of dictatorship, disappearance, and terrorism has given rise to new
sites of memory that defy older traditions tied to exclusion and nationalism. The 1994 terrorist bombing
of the AMIA community center in Buenos Aires, the most important Jewish building in Latin America,
is a particularly knotty instance of the controversies surrounding remembering and forgetting on a
continent often marked by narrow, authoritarian views of belonging. This paper will analyse the issues
involved in memorial building and the performance of remembering at the site of the AMIA as an
example of larger questions of who controls communal remembrance and what paradigms can be used to
construct contemporary memory. Jewish memorial practices and the Holocaust play an especially
important role in Argentina, entering into a dialogue with newly minted forms of Argentine
remembering and creating a new language more suited to our times.

KEYWORDS: memorials; Argentina; Jewish

Our house is a mass grave

On July 18, 1994, at 9:53 a.m., a powerful car bomb exploded in downtown
Buenos Aires at the site of the AMIA building (Figure 1). The blast did not
discriminate. Eighty-five people of all ethnicities and creeds died that day, scores
were injured, and little remained of the surrounding apartment houses, schools,
and stores. Images emanating from Pasteur Street could have come from Sarajevo,
Beirut, and Kosovo, or from New York, London, and Madrid, or from any city
torn by sectarian violence or terrorist attack.
More than 12 years have passed since that sinister day, but the heinous crime
has not been solved. The much-botched evidence points to Iranian masterminds
with significant local help from members of the provincial Buenos Aires police
force. A much-delayed trial of minor accessories to the villainy that began in
Buenos Aires at about the time of the Twin Tower disaster is not expected to

Correspondence: Edna Aizenberg, Marymount Manhattan College, Humanities Department,

221 East 71 St., New York, NY 10021, USA. Tel: 646 485 1151. E-mail: eaizenberg@mmm.edu

ISSN 1357-6275 (print) ISSN 1469-9885 (online) Ó 2007 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/13576270701255099
110 E. Aizenberg

FIGURE 1. The bombed out building of the AMIA.

bring much, given the ingrained heritage of injustice, impunity, and incompe-
tence, despite promises from successive Argentine governments. Argentine
president Nestor Kirchner vowed to pursue the AMIA case with vigor, but an
editorial in the important daily La Nación asserted with perhaps unintended
understatement: ‘‘Unfortunately, in the many years elapsed since the crime was
perpetrated, the cause of justice has lost valuable, largely irretrievable, time’’
(‘‘Editorial,’’ 2003).
This lack of resolution fosters a particularly intense need for commemoration.
The fact that the killers continue to walk free, turning a community’s house
into a mass grave, has made the work of memory more acute, more urgent,
more combative (see Jelin & Kaufman, 2002). In what in Argentina is a very
short time, the weight of history, the strong memory traditions of Judaic
culture, and the unresolved pain have come together in controversial and
competing spaces that inscribe remembrance and injury, but also serve as an
unequivocal call to action. This paper will investigate the different political,
cultural, and social dynamics that shape memorial-making at the AMIA within
the context of public memory (and un-memory) in a Latin American country
on the edge.
 Argentine space, Jewish memory 111

From the heights of Macchu Picchu to Buenos Aires’s fearful shoals

When we think about Latin America’s great stones, its remembrance places, we
usually conjure up the monumental constructions of pre-Columbian antiquity:
Peru’s Macchu Picchu, or Mexico’s Teotihuacán and Chichén Itzá. ‘‘Tall city of
stepped stones,’’ sang the Chilean Nobel Laureate Pablo Neruda in his majestic
poem to the heights of Macchu Picchu, ‘‘mother of stone and sperm of
condors . . . This was the habitation, this is the site,’’ the site of Latin America’s
glory and misery. That is why Neruda asks with barely contained rage: ‘‘Stone
upon stone, and man, where was he? [Piedra en la piedra, el hombre, dónde
estuvo?]’’ (Tapscott, 1996, pp. 210 – 211).
Latin America’s memory map has varied little since the start of the twenty-first
century. In contrast to the USA and Europe’s memorial landscape, deeply scarred
by events so close to us that we have lived through them, Latin America continues
to be associated with ancient pre-Columbian monumentality; the exceptions are
the frequent triumphal equestrian statues to founding fathers, and the ornate
Spanish colonial plazas, cathedrals, and churches. In Germany, the Berlin Wall
was perhaps the most significant, if unintended, monument to the Second World
War; in Latin America, the ‘‘Wall’’ is the ancient Macchu Picchu rampart
celebrated by Neruda or the archaeological pyramid at Teotihaucán evoked by the
Mexican Nobel Laureate Octavio Paz in his ‘‘Hymn among the Ruins’’ (Tapscott,
1996, pp. 212, 258). Pilgrimages to these places, be they merely tourist in nature
or more significantly socio-political, reiterate this time-honored itinerary. Who
travels to Latin America to find the man or woman in the stone upon stone of our
days? How does today’s stone upon stone, piedra en la piedra, remember the
wretched at its base, to echo Neruda’s poetic formulation, the disappeared, or the
blown to smithereens by a terrorist bomb?
With these reflections as a takeoff point, this author wants to begin to trace a
broader, more contemporary memory map for Latin America, a map that includes
Jewish places and that merits commentary within Latin American, Jewish, and
memory studies. My path leads me away from the mountain heights of Macchu
Picchu to the low-lying shores of Buenos Aires; Buenos Aires, astride the ‘‘torpid
and muddy’’ River Plate, as its poet, the world-renowned author Jorge Luis
Borges, described it, may be a more appropriate scenario for my alternate map,
since what brings me here is the history of the last few decades with its legacy of
shattered rubble and broken fragments (Borges, 1974, p. 81).
To walk through the streets of Buenos Aires today, its memory landscape
reminds us more and more of the great postmodern (postcolonial?) world capitals,
disfigured by the horrors of the twentieth century and marked by the arduous
architectural work of memory: commemorative murals, monuments, gardens, and
meditative public spaces. Buenos Aires has always prided itself on being the most
‘‘European’’ (nowadays it would be the most ‘‘global’’) of Latin American cities,
the Paris of the South. Perversely, now: walking in and around Buenos Aires
in 2003 is akin to walking in Berlin, with its multiple memorial plaques, such as
112 E. Aizenberg

the one near the Wittenbergplatz metro station, with its simple inscription: ‘‘Orte
des Schreckens, die wir niemals vergessen dürfen [Places of terror we should never
forget]’’ and the names of the concentration camps; or visiting the cemeteries on
the beaches of Normandy, as this author did on an appropriately rainy, windswept
day, rows and rows of crosses, an occasional Star of David, and a chilling silence;
or going up to Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem, whose implacably overwhelming
collection of tree-bordered avenues, memorial statues, commemorative squares,
halls, and museums gives testimony to the Holocaust through the continuous,
multifaceted, and changing work of architectural remembrance (see Handelman &
Shamgar-Handelman, 1997).
My comparisons may seem so little Latin American, so little ‘‘indigenous,’’ but
why are they not seen against the background of the Argentine dictatorships of the
1970s with the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, who walked in Buenos Aires’s
central square demanding news of their tens of thousands disappeared children;
then the disastrous and pointless Falkland (Malvinas) War with the UK with its
hundreds of dead in the 1980s, followed in the 1990s by the twin terrorist
bombings in Buenos Aires of the Israeli embassy (1992) and the AMIA building,
Latin America’s largest and most important Jewish community center (1994). The
ruins we see today, the walls, inscriptions, memorials, and plazas that recall so
much terror are much more akin to that plaque in Berlin (‘‘places of terror we
should never forget’’) than to stones from a long-distant past.
The theme of contemporary Latin American memorial space, and the
importance of the Judaic within it, has received relatively little study. Until now,
writing has been seen as the privileged keeper of contemporary memory.
‘‘Literature and memory’’ is the approximate title of countless testimonies,
poems, novels, essays, and works of criticism, thus writings and books have been
sites of resistance and remembrance.
One of the first memorials to the victims of the AMIA explosion was the volume
edited by the Argentine poet Eliahu Toker, intended, in his words, as ‘‘a kind of
monument in pen and ink [un monumento de papel y tinta]’’ (Toker, 1995,
p. vii). The book contains a page dedicated to each of the 85 murdered, composed
of interviews, photos, poems, and a page to the 86th fallen, the AMIA building
itself, assassinated just months short of its 50th birthday. Latin American context
and Hebraic tradition meet in this gesture, since yizkor bikher, Yiddish memorial
books, are essential to the repertoire of Jewish memory after the Holocaust,
serving to work through the trauma of destruction, as David Roskies has reminded
us (Roskies, 1999, p. 61). ‘‘For murdered people without graves,’’ writes James
Young in his penetrating study on Holocaust memorials, ‘‘without even corpses to
inter, these memorial books often came to serve as symbolic tombstones’’ (Young,
1993, p. 7). We now know the phenomenon of people without graves all too well
in New York, where so many bodies from the Twin Towers catastrophe will never
be recovered (see Lipton & Glanz, 2002).
Young and Toker’s comments, the idea of a ‘‘monument in pen and ink’’ or a
‘‘symbolic tombstone,’’ evoke a spatial notion of literature, born of disaster (see
Blanchot, 1982; Ropars-Wuilleumier, 2002). Pressured by murderous events, the
 Argentine space, Jewish memory 113

written word seeks to engrave on the page what cannot be chiseled on public
space. Even when tombstones are erected and memorials built, the word refuses to
relinquish this role, giving narrative substance to landscapes of fear, to use Yi-Fu
Tuan’s term. The two most forceful novelistic elaborations of the AMIA tragedy
by well-known Argentine writers, Marcos Aguinis’s Asalto al paraı́so [Assault on
paradise] (2002) and Ricardo Feierstein’s, La logia del umbral [The threshold
lodge] (2001) skillfully turn paper into place. Aguinis begins in the fiery pit of what
was once the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires and ends in the bloody hole of the
AMIA; Feierstein opens at the Plaza de Mayo, Argentina’s official lieu de mémoire
with its iconic May Pyramid celebrating Argentine independence, just as the
AMIA implodes into a thousand pieces and ends with the edifice gone.
Feierstein, trained as an architect, traces a particularly maddening and
labyrinthine trajectory across Argentina’s dizzying geography from the venerable
Plaza de Mayo to Moisesville, the foundational pampas town where Jewish
immigrants first came, to the hapless AMIA and back to the plaza again; it is as if
his protagonist, Mauricio Argentino Schvel, the man on the threshold (schvel
means ‘‘threshold’’ in Yiddish) needs to walk (or like a good gaucho, ride) the
length and breadth of the land in order to possess it (see Aizenberg, 2003). And
just like his biblical ancestor, Abraham, he never does. Searching in the remains of
the embassy and the AMIA, Feierstein and Aguinis explore the fundamentalist
mind and remember the massacred, visit Argentina’s hallowed memory sites, and
insist on the insertion of immigrant names and places: Schvel is about to bury a
time capsule at the base of the May Pyramid at the very moment the AMIA
bursts apart.
There are already studies on these important novels, on memory and literature
in the Southern Hemisphere (see Sadow, 2003), but the public and physical space
of Argentine memory, more difficult to tackle because it is communal and
controversial, has been the object of less commentary. Until very recently, with the
exception of some salient examples, such as the essays in the issue on ‘‘Arte y
polı́tica de la memoria [The art and politics of memory]’’ in the cultural studies
journal, Punto de vista or the compilation, Monumentos, memoriales y marcas
territoriales [Monuments, memorials, and territorial marks] by Jelin and Langland,
there was more scholarship on shopping centers, gated communities, and
billboards as components of Buenos Aires’ shifting urban landscape than on
memorials to its victims, even though these are changing the face of the ‘‘Paris of
the South’’ in painful ways (Ballent, 2003; Jelin & Langland, 2002; Punto de vista,
2000; Sarlo, 1994). These changes are occurring in a social space teeming with
new dialogues and new relationships (see Massey & Miles on urban social space).1

Places of absence and presence

This author would like, then, to take the first steps on a journey through the space
that some would rather forget. (On forgetting in Argentina and neighboring Chile,
see Jelin & Kaufman, 2002; Wilde 2002.) These will be the first steps on a larger
map that will include the uncompleted Parque de la Memoria [Memory Park]
114 E. Aizenberg

taking shape by the River Plate near the campus of Buenos Aires University. This
will be a site to remember the disappeared of the dictatorship years, so that no one
will ignore, as its founders bluntly put it in their mission statement, ‘‘that the lion-
colored river turned red with the blood of the bodies hurled into it from low-flying
naval airplanes’’ (Comisión Pro Monumento, 1999, p. 2). It will also be a place to
remember the butchered of the AMIA, with an area reserved for a memorial to the
85, probably made of a black granite chunk containing the ‘‘A’’ of the ravaged
building’s façade.2 The map will also include the infamous torture center of the
ESMA, Naval Mechanics School, not long ago turned into a memory site to recall
the detained-disappeared in the dictatorship years.3
In addition to the Parque and the ESMA, this author’s expanded map will
incorporate the Monument to Democracy by the renowned Jewish – Czech –
Argentine kinetic sculptor Gyula Kosice, located at the prime intersection of
Buenos Aires’s grand Avenida 9 de Julio and Marcelo T. de Alvear. The
monument is a mutating combination of concrete columns, mirrored spheres, and
jets of water. The watery spurts represent liberty, solidarity, and peace; the reflec-
ting ball represents the constantly changing physical (and political?) environment.
It is the only monument to democracy in the world, Kosice claims. He conceived
it after the fall of the generals, when Argentina returned to democracy.
This author will consider the paradoxical implications of the ‘‘honor’’ Kosice
has bestowed on his adoptive country, as well as elusive show-and-tell of the
somber hole on stylish Arroyo Street where the Israeli legation once stood, now
turned tree-planted memorial space, and euphemistically named ‘‘Israel Embassy
Plaza’’; or the incongruously dialogic commemorative wall in the Buenos Aires
cathedral that incorporates objects saved from the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto, the
Israeli embassy, and the AMIA. These polemical and charged memorial spaces
(the Parque de la Memoria, the Monument to Democracy, the Israel Embassy
Plaza, the commemorative wall in the cathedral) bespeak a new Hebraic presence
that contrasts markedly with Argentina’s traditional monument landscape,
teeming with the statues of horse-borne founding fathers and steles to still-
venerated military heroes.
However, no contemporary Jewish lieu de mémoire incises its searing scars on
Buenos Aires’s cityscape as much as the first stop on my memory map, the AMIA
building at Pasteur Street 633. It forms one point of a triangle of memorial places
devoted to the calamity, with a second point on Plaza Lavalle in front of
Argentina’s High Court, and a third on the Tablada Cemetery just outside the
capital. When the Buenos Aires municipality completes the AMIA memorial in
the Parque de la Memoria, the remembrance places will trace a rhombus, calling
to mind the deathly and prescient geography of Borges’s masterful Holocaust era
story, ‘‘Death and the Compass,’’ rife with the alleged murder of Jews at three,
really four, precise points throughout the city.4
Before entering into my discussion of Pasteur 633, it should be noted that
Borges was among the first to deal with what Richard Terdiman has called the
twentieth century’s memory crisis (Terdiman, 1993). In yet another of Borges’s
prophetic stories ‘‘Funes the Memorious,’’ the immobilized protagonist suffers
 Argentine space, Jewish memory 115

from mnemonic overload and the inability to select and shape what he remembers.
The opposite occurs in Borges’s World War II tale, ‘‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis
Tertius’’: here a totalitarian world order obliterates the history of the narrator’s
childhood, a fictitious past supplants that other past, and nothing is certain, even
the falseness of the ‘‘new’’ past. Borgesian narratives and AMIA memorials, stones
and scribbles; these witness not merely the need to remember, but also the distinct
forms of remembering, and the heated debates that accompany the elaboration of
memory.

Pasteur 633
This bloody spot is the most complex, conflict-ridden lieu de mémoire. Inaugurated
in 1945, the AMIA building was built as an affirmation of survival in the New
World after the catastrophe in the Old World. The building itself was a kind of
monument, since it housed institutions and libraries, including YIVO that had
once existed in Europe but were no more. In an era that had supposedly put aside
the terrible legacy of the Holocaust, the destruction of this living memorial and
symbol of resurrection just a scant year before its jubilee, gave the loss special
poignancy, and largely determined the way memory was configured on Pasteur
Street.
Shortly after the attack the ruins of the building were surrounded by a wooden
retaining wall, the sort used in construction (or demolition) sites. This ordinary
plank fence that barely hid the remains hanging precariously behind it very quickly
became sacred ground (see Linenthal, 2001, pp. 190 – 194). Painted black, with
the words justicia y memoria emblazoned across it in white aerosol, the humble wall
was transfigured into the Wall. ‘‘Please respect this site,’’ say the signs posted on
the top, and ‘‘Remember the pain that never stops.’’
The AMIA Wall reminds us of the power that can emanate from the found
monument, as in the case of the Berlin Wall, or even more analogously, as in the
case of the chain-link Murrah fence in Oklahoma City, put up around the site of the
1995 terrorist bombing in which 168 people died, and turned into a spontaneous
memorial through the acts of thousands of individuals. At Ground Zero, St. Paul’s
Chapel’s iron fence, as close as one can get to the debris of September 11, has
become the Fence, the longest lasting and largest grassroots memorial to the
victims, a kaleidoscope of signed t-shirts, banners, posters, baseball caps, and teddy
bears. These impromptu shrines, like the AMIA Wall, are at once collective
memorials and domestic mourning places, public forums and personal offering
spots, rubble become relic, as Edward Linenthal aptly puts it in his Unfinished
bombing, an exhaustive and exemplary study of the Oklahoma site (Herman, 2000;
Linenthal, 2001, pp. 164 – 171; ‘‘On the fence,’’ n.d.; Young, 1993, p. vii).
Indeed, physical fragility and nonexistent esthetic value do not mitigate the
AMIA fence’s symbolic, almost religious, aura. On the 18th of every month, in a
chillingly simple memorial ritual, families and friends gather in front of the Wall
holding up a poster with the photo, name, and age of their beloved dead. After
observing a moment of silence, they read out the names of the victims, light a
116 E. Aizenberg

candle, and place a rose at the base of the makeshift shrine (see Richardson,
2001). They end with poems and demands that justice no longer be delayed.
Eliahu Toker’s verses, ‘‘18 de Julio,’’ exemplify the poetic outpouring, with the
word conjuring up the theme of ruination, now in modern Buenos Aires not
ancient Macchu Picchu, melding Argentine space and Jewish memory,
particularly through the number 18, in Judaic tradition the cipher for chai or life:

Se acabó el sueño, comenzó la The dream is over, the nightmare

pesadilla.
Yo sigo andando,
las manos destrozadas, la lengua
demolida.
Desde las pantallas vociferan los
escombros
y el agua incolora, inodora, insı́pida
arrastra espanto y sangre.
Nuestra casa es una fosa colectiva.
Buenos Aires colma los cafés
como si no estuviese en ruinas
El 18 solı́a ser la cifra de la vida.
(AMIA: July 18th and the aftermath, 1999 – 2000, my translation)
has started.
I push on
Hands shattered, tongue struck
dumb.
Rubble shrieks from TV screens
And the colorless, odorless,
tasteless water
Now runs with horror and blood.
Our house is a mass grave.
Buenos Aires fills its cafés to the
brim
As if it didn’t lie in ruins.
18 used to be the number for life.

The wall and the ruins are like the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, said one young
man, the hallowed fragments that remained after the destruction of the Holy
Temple (AMIA: July 18th and the aftermath, 1999 – 2000). His comments invest the
modest throwaway enclosure with the iconographic and spiritual energy of
Judaism’s holiest ruin, the Western or Wailing Wall, Kotel, in Hebrew, ‘‘quoted’’
and ‘‘reconstituted’’ in many places of adversity and renewal. One of the first, great
monuments to the Holocaust, Nathan Rapoport’s Warsaw Ghetto Memorial,
erected on the Polish capital’s Zamenhof Street in 1948, mimics the huge blocks of
the ghetto’s segregating wall and the temple’s sacred stones; Rapoport’s reworking
has been reworked not far from the Kotel itself at Yad Vashem in a kind of
reconstruction to the second degree, and serves as background for Yom Hashoah’s
Holocaust Remembrance Day’s opening ceremonies. Closer to Buenos Aires and
the AMIA, in neighboring Montevideo, a striking riverside memorial to the
Holocaust and (by extension) to the Uruguayan disappeared of the 1970s, also
evokes the Western Wall, integrating Uruguayan and Jewish hurts, the rocks of the
Rı́o de la Plata shoreline and the Jerusalem hills (see Aizenberg, 2003).
Once again, literature preternaturally stamped on the page what was not as yet
chiseled on public space. Writing about exile and return to Buenos Aires after
the Argentine dictatorship in her 1990 meditation-novel, En estado de memoria
[In a state of memory], author Tununa Mercado movingly describes a
 Argentine space, Jewish memory 117

‘‘witness-wall . . . sunk into the heart of this city block . . . as vast as my own heart
and as white as the Wailing Wall,’’ a pierced and racked witness-wall that is at
once physical space and writing space, a crumbling but imposing witness wall on
which the writer must gouge out ‘‘texts and overlapping texts,’’ uncertain lines,
awkward letters, grooves, and graffiti in order to begin to narrate the catastrophe;
no, in order to begin to narrate ‘‘the conditions for writing after a catastrophe’’
(Mercado, 2001, pp. 145, 155, xv). Perhaps the names and sayings on the AMIA
Wall are that beginning.
While Jewish tradition and catastrophe are invoked at the AMIA through the
Kotel and the Yad Vashem-like avenue of 85 trees planted along Pasteur Street,
each with a plaque and a name, the posters with the names, faces, and ages held up
at the remembrance ceremonies dialogue with an image from Argentina’s
sanguinary recent past: the snapshots of their desaparecidos that the now-legendary
Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo carried untiringly in the quintessential site of the
polis during the dark period which had its own Hitler overtones, so that their
children and grandchildren would not be forgotten and would be set free (see
Bouvard, 1994). And, in effect, some of the Mothers have forged ties with groups
such as Familiares y Amigos de las Victimas del Atentado a la AMIA [Relatives
and friends of victims of the AMIA bombing] and Memoria Activa, another major
relatives’ organization.
Near the wreckage of the AMIA, the dictatorship years converse with the
Holocaust, the Holy City’s millenary Wailing Wall with Buenos Aires’s ephemeral
plywood fence, Argentine space with Jewish memory and, furthermore, Jewish
space with Argentine memory. Ironically, the pluralistic solidarity so often elusive
in Argentine society has partially been achieved through shared suffering (on
melding of traditions, see Greenhalgh, 1999, pp. 44 – 45, 56).
Despite the cooperation and good will, memory still remains fractious on
Pasteur Street. When the families, themselves often split by differences of opinion
and opposing strategies of dealing with the pain and political-judicial struggles,
requested that the symbolism of the avenue of trees be reinforced by changing the
name of the block in front of the destroyed building to ‘‘Martyrs of the AMIA,’’
the Buenos Aires Municipality balked, agreeing only to use it as a subtitle, in what
was seen as an attempt to diminish the accusations of government culpability.
‘‘We don’t want it to be a subtitle,’’ insisted Sofı́a Kaplinsky Guterman, whose
daughter Andrea died in the attack, ‘‘We really want to give the victims the place
that they deserve’’ (AMIA: July 18th and the aftermath, 1999 – 2000).

How to give them the place that they deserve?

The arguments surrounding this crucial question arose not only with the
Argentine state, reluctant like other states to call attention to its own crimes,
but also among those closest to the victims. In May 1999, barely 2 months before
the fifth anniversary of the bombing, a new AMIA building was inaugurated on the
ashes of the old (Figure 2). Now, behind the Wall, there is a giant gray cement
hulk of a building, set back from the sidewalk, an anti-terrorist bunker crammed
118 E. Aizenberg

FIGURE 2. The new AMIA building with the portion of the name-wall retained.

with the latest security gizmos designed to assure that it will not be destroyed
again. In the large open courtyard separating the spotless edifice from the sidewalk
and the Wall and the security checkpoint (the courtyard is another anti-bomb
precaution), there now stands a monument designed by the Israeli sculptor
Yaacov Agam, one of Kosice’s famed kinetic colleagues. On July 9th Avenue,
a mutating combination of concrete columns, mirrored spheres, and water to
celebrate democracy; on Pasteur Street, a mutating combination of columns,
colors and geometric shapes to recall what democracy could not protect (Figure 3).
With the brand new building and memorial, the mnemonic equilibrium of the
street has been profoundly altered in ways that trouble the survivors. ‘‘They are
building on the blood of our loved ones,’’ some of them protested, anticipating the
disputes that arose around the footprints of the blasted Twin Towers. ‘‘They
shouldn’t have touched those ruins, the new building doesn’t represent the
triumph of life over death’’ (Young, 1999, p. 18). For the government and the
AMIA leadership, the sacred Wall had become an eyesore; it had to go, like other
found monuments engendered by grief (see Chan, 2003). But if it went, could
Agam’s memorial alone carry the burden of remembrance at Pasteur 633? Made
up of nine multicolored columns rising from a base, the monument invites the
onlooker to stroll among the columns through a kaleidoscopic labyrinth that
moves from destruction (Column I) to reconstruction (Column IX), tracing
biblical and Jewish symbols along the way, including a red menorah, a red, white,
and blue Star of David, and the six-angled white and purple logo of the AMIA
(‘‘Monumento’’).
‘‘Many people like it because of the attractive colors, and they get caught up in
walking through and around it,’’ Anita Weinstein, a survivor of the attack, said.
‘‘But we feel that that’s not what should be there; it has no feeling, it doesn’t speak
 Argentine space, Jewish memory 119

FIGURE 3. AMIA monument by Yaacov Agam.

to the heart, and it doesn’t include an homage to the victims’’ (A. Weinstein,
personal communication). Agam had suggested adding a more personal homage
anchored in the gruesome event: 86 colored steps going up the length of the
building to symbolize each one of the dead. But the stairway, with its celestial and
biblical intimations, and more direct allusion to the tragedy, was eliminated from
the final plan supposedly for lack of funds. It was replaced by a modest glass
plaque engraved with the victims’ names, a sort of demotion to second place of
what should have been highlighted.
The kinetic memorial’s lack of Argentine and democratic credentials also
grated. ‘‘It would have been more appropriate to invite Argentine artists to submit
proposals, this would have underlined the fact that we were all attacked, that this
bombing affected all Argentines,’’ commented Mariana Shapiro, a sculptor whose
haunting, Judaically- and locally-informed design (burning books from the raped
library flying heavenward) was selected in the competition for the memorial to the
AMIA victims in the Tablada Cemetery (M. Shapiro, personal communication).
This was not the case with Agam’s monument, conceived from above by
commissions, boards of directors, and ambassadors, without consulting the
families and the community, reinforcing instead of challenging the authoritarian
power structures (see Chab, 2001). It was one more example, according to those
who care and know, of the anti-democratic and demagogic way in which so many
decisions are made in contemporary Argentina.
120 E. Aizenberg

Well intentioned, but little related to the Argentine place, community, or

material evidence of destruction, Agam’s peacock-shaded geometric extravaganza,
‘‘doesn’t speak to the heart,’’ raising in Buenos Aires questions that have been
raised elsewhere: can art as form, only tenuously connected to the street where it
lives, enter the public sphere effectively and contribute to the common good? (see
Miles, 1997, p. 90). Is it, as Anita Weinstein pointedly suggested, ‘‘what should be
there’’?

A quasi-conclusion
In the end, the section of the Wall with the names and the signs remained where it
was, a people’s memorial that is seen before anything else when entering the
AMIA; Agam’s memorial remains hidden in the courtyard between the Wall and
the building, underlining the security-fueled segregation that is one result of the
bombing, unable to call to the most casual passerby. Recently, multi-hued and all,
it has been forced to share attention with a small plaque put up to the Jewish
disappeared under the dictatorship, also hidden behind the security wall.
Speaking of the scars of memory and remembrance on Pasteur Street before a
gathering of families and activists, Tununa Mercado, whose literary witness-wall
anticipated the wood and concrete, perceptively noted that unlike the Israel
embassy site where the vast space, left empty, was in a sense the memorial, on the
AMIA block the decision was to build and to remember on top of the mutilation.
The ‘‘marks,’’ she said, ‘‘are the names of the victims engraved on the façade and
on the ground, near the trees’’ (Acto del Lunes, 2000). Tellingly, Mercado does
not even mention Agam’s creation.
The juxtaposed memorials—one international, official, abstract, more akin in
ways to the grand monuments of earlier eras; the other, local, spontaneous,
graphic, linked to newer paradigms of smallness and sacredness—further
complicate the site’s contentious remembrance. But they likewise suggest that
competing memorials may sometimes be a strong form of inscribing a violent
place’s controversies (see Pitcaithley, 2002). By foregrounding such tragedy and
controversy, these new stones of memory frontally engage Latin America’s
twentieth-century disappeared and blown apart, and they grapple with the
continent’s social and cultural dilemmas.
Hardly ‘‘Macchu Picchian,’’ they whisper—or shout: What do you remember
and forget? Who owns memory: generals, statesmen, survivors, or families? What
do you leave undisturbed, what do you rebuild, and how? Can different people
and traditions be incorporated into an idea of nation that does not derive from
fundamentalism or dictatorship?
The new Latin American memory stones do not overwhelm us as the
monumental remains of ancient civilizations but as the fresh wounds of modern
barbarisms. They set us squarely in the here and now, challenging us to redraw
Latin America’s ever changing memory map. That is why, in the final analysis,
they also claim Neruda’s mighty writing voice in the present. A version of his
poem ‘‘Forever’’ [Siempre], included in the same Canto General where we find the
 Argentine space, Jewish memory 121

‘‘Heights of Macchu Picchu,’’ was posted on the Wall by the victims’ names,
declaring: ‘‘A thousand dark-winged nights will fall, / without destroying the day
these dead await. / The day so many of us await throughout / the world, the final
day of suffering. /A just day. . . / and you, fallen brothers . . . / will be with us on that
vast day, / the final day of our struggle’’ (Neruda, 1991, p. 191).5

Notes
[1] My own tussles with this knotty subject, born in part from the horrific death of my close friend
Susy Kreiman in the belly of the AMIA, do not mean that this author has given up on literature
or the printed page (am I not writing these words, the prelude to a book in progress, Stones of
memory?), but I am now more aware of writing’s limitations. No story demands the attention of
the most casual passerby as does the heartrending sign posted at the AMIA, ‘‘Remember the
pain that never stops [Recordar el dolor que no cesa]’’; no novel is the site of searing communal
remembrance, sacred ground. By the same token, I am more aware of public space’s
engagement with letters, not merely in an overarching semiotic sense (all is text), but as a milieu
shot through with the stuff of writing: images of books, quotations, poetry, and above all, names,
the names of the dead.
[2] I had the sad privilege of walking through the park’s boggy construction site with Marcelo Brodsky,
photographer and conceptual artist, one of the commission’s members, and Florencia Battiti,
liaison between the Buenos Aires Municipality and the artists who will contribute sculptures to the
parque, the first major architectural recognition by Argentina’s power brokers that yes, terrible
things happened here. I also had the proud privilege of participating in the inauguration of Dennis
Oppenheim’s sculptural creation, ‘‘Monumento al Escape,’’ composed of three superimposed,
twisted, and, fortunately useless concrete cells. The park has also installed two other works,
William Tucker’s ‘‘Victoria,’’ and an untitled trio of bronze figures with hollowed, absent insides
by Roberto Aizenberg (1928 – 1995), one of Argentina’s world-class talents, born on the Jewish
pampas; Aizenberg began his career with the evocative and paradigmatic painting, ‘‘Burning of the
Hassidic school in Minsk, 1713’’; he left Argentina during the dictatorship that killed his
stepchildren, and died after falling into a deep depression brought on by the Israeli embassy
bombing, testimony to the many links between tragedy and tragedy, place and place.
[3] I was able to visit the ESMA, not yet open to the general public, during a conference on ‘‘Art
and the Memory of Terror’’ held in Buenos Aires in November, 2005. My thanks to Eugenia
Bekeris and the organizers of the gathering for making this visit possible.
[4] A further Borgesian premonition: the heart of the AMIA memorial at the Parque as I noted
earlier, will be a jagged slab fragment salvaged from the building’s great granite front, etched
with the first ‘‘A’’ of its name. Marcelo Brodsky found it picking in the mountains of debris from
the AMIA carted to the riverside and dumped like so much household garbage not far from the
parque’s site. ‘‘There is something kabbalistic about this letter, like the mystical Hebrew alef,’’ he
said in a conversation, recalling Borges’s el aleph, the multus in parvum hiding and shining in a
Buenos Aires house about to be torn down.
[5] My thanks to Jane Calow, organizer of the conference on Public Representation and Private
Mourning Conference, held in Bristol, UK, in March 2002, for the opportunity to present an
early version of this essay.

REFERENCES
ACTO DEL LUNES (2000, December 18). Memoria Activa. Retrieved 25 September, 2003, from
http://memoriaactiva.com/discurso 18-12-00.htm
AGUINIS, M. (2002). Asalto al paraı́so. Buenos Aires: Planeta.
AIZENBERG, E. (2000). Las madres de la Calle Pasteur: la lucha por el pluralismo en la Argentina
[The Mothers of Pasteur Street: the struggle for pluralism in Argentina]. Revista Iberoamericana
66(191), 339 – 345.
122 E. Aizenberg
AIZENBERG, E. (2002, June). El Memorial al Holocausto del Pueblo Judı́o de Montevideo: entre genocidios
y desaparecidos. Paper presented at the Second International AMIA Conference on
Reconstructing Jewish Culture.
AIZENBERG, E. (2003). Books and bombs in Buenos Aires. Hanover: University of New England Press.
AMIA: July 18th and the aftermath [AMIA: 18 de julio y después] (1999 – 2000). [CD-ROM]. Buenos
Aires: KehilaNet.
BALLENT, A. (2003). Et in Arcadia ego: muerte y vida en los countries y barrios privados. Punto de
Vista, 75, 17 – 24.
BLANCHOT, M. (1982). The space of literature (Ann Smock, Trans.). Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press (Original work published 1955).
BORGES, J. L. (1974). Fundación mı́tica de Buenos Aires [Mythical Foundation of Buenos Aires].
Obras Completas. Buenos Aires: Emecé.
BOUVARD, M. G. (1994). Revolutionizing Motherhood: The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. Wilmington,
DE: SR Books.
CHAB, S. (2001). Entre la crisis y la esperanza: la comunidad judeoargentina tras el atentado a la AMIA.
Buenos Aires: Catalogos.
CHAN, E. (2003, September 28). Grief aside, some memorials are more equal than others. New York
Times, pp. 14:6.
Comisión Pro Monumento a las Vı́ctimas del Terrorismo de Estado. ‘‘Documento leı́do en el acto de la
colocación de la piedra fundamental del monumento a las vı́ctimas del terrorismo del estado, 24 de
marzo de 1999.’’ [Statement read at the groundbreaking ceremony for the monument to victims of state
terrorism, March 24, 1999]. http://www.desaparecidos.org.ar/monumento.htm
Editorial (2003, 8 October). AIMA: una inmensa deuda moral. La Nación. Retrieved January
2007, from http://www.lanacion.com.ar/archivo/nota.asp?nota_id¼533807&origin¼acumulado&
acumulado_id¼
FEIERSTEIN, R. (2001). La logia del umbral. Buenos Aires: Galerna.
GREENHALGH, S. (1999). Our lady of flowers: The ambiguous politics of Diana’s floral revolution.
In A. KEAR & D. L. STEINBERG (Eds.), Mourning Diana: Nation, Culture and the Performance of
Grief (pp. 40 – 59). London and New York: Routledge.
HALBWACHS, M. (1980). The Collective Memory. New York: Harper (Original work published
1950).
HANDELMAN, D., & SHAMGAR-HANDELMAN, L. (1997). The Presence of Absence: The
Memorialism of National Death in Israel. In E. BEN-ARI & Y. BILU (Eds.), Grasping Land:
Space and Place in Contemporary Israeli Discourse and Experience (pp. 85 – 128). Albany: State
University of New York Press.
HERMAN, B. (2000). Berlin wall goes back to the future. USA Today, pp. 14.8.
JELIN, E., & KAUFMAN, S. G. (2002). Layers of Memories: Twenty Years After in Argentina.
In D. E. LOREY & W. F. BEEZLEY (Eds.), Genocide, Collective Violence, Popular Memory: The
Politics of Remembrance in the Twentieth Century (pp. 31 – 52). Wilmington, DE: SR Books.
JELIN, E., & LANGLAND, V. (Eds.). (2002). Monumentos, memoriales y marcas terrritorales. Madrid:
Siglo XXI.
KAMINSKY, A. (1999). After Exile: Writing the Latin American Disapora. Minneapolis, MN: University
of Minnesota Press.
LINENTHAL, E. T. (2001). The Unfinished Bombing: Oklahoma City in American Memory. New York:
Oxford University Press.
LIPTON, E., & GLANZ, J. (2002, 22 April). DNA science pushed to the limit in identifying the dead of
September 11. The New York Times, 4.22. A1, A14.
MASSEY, D. (1994). Space, Place, and Gender. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
MERCADO, T. (2001). In a State of Memory. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press
(Original work published 1990).
MILES, M. (1997). Art, Space and the City: Public Art and Urban Futures. London and New York:
Routledge.
Monumento de Homenaje y Recordación a las vı́ctimas del atentado a al AMIA (1999). Buenos Aires:
AMIA.
NERUDA, P. (1991). Forever. Canto General [General Song] (Jack Schmitt, Trans.). Berkley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press.
NORA, P. (1992). Lieux de Mémoire. Paris: Gallimard.
On the fence. (n.d.). http://www.saintpaulchapel.org/news/article_130.html. 9/6/03.
 Argentine space, Jewish memory 123
PITCAITHLEY, D. (2002, March). The American Civil War and contemporary society: Remembering and
forgetting. Paper presented at the Public Representation and Private Mourning Conference,
Bristol, UK.
Punto de vista (2000). Special issue on Arte y polı́tica de la memoria [The Art and Politics of Memory]
No. 68.
RICHARDSON, M. (2001). The Gift of Presence: The Act of Leaving Artifacts at Shrines, Memorials,
and Other Tragedies. In P. C. ADAMS, S. HOELSCHER, & K. E. TILL (Eds.), Textures of Place:
Exploring Humanist Geographies (pp. 257 – 272). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota
Press.
ROPARS-WUILLEUMIER, M.-C. (2002). Ecrire l’espace. Saint-Denis: PUU.
ROSKIES, D. G. (1999). The Jewish Search for a Usable Past. Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana
Press.
SADOW, S. A. (2003). Lamentations for the AMIA: Literary responses to communal trauma. Unpublished
manuscript.
SARLO, B. (1994). Escenas de la vida posmoderna: intelectuales, arte y videocultura en la Argentina
[Scenes of postmodern life: intellectuals, art and video-culture in Argentina]. Buenos Aires:
Ariel.
TAPSCOTT, S. (1996). Twentieth-Century Latin American Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology. Austin, TX:
University of Texas Press.
TERDIMAN, R. (1993). Past Present. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
TOKER, E. (1995). Sus nombres y sus rostros: álbum recordatorio de las vı́ctimas del atentado del 18 de julio
de 1994 [Their names and faces: memorial album to the victims of the July 18th 1994 bombing].
Buenos Aires: Editorial Milá/AMIA.
TUAN, Yi-Fu (1977). Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis, MN: University of
Minnesota Press.
TUAN, Yi-Fu (1979). Landscapes of Fear. New York: Pantheon.
WILDE, A. (2002). Irruptions of Memory: Expressive Politics in Chile’s Transition to Democracy.
Genocide, Collective Violence, and Popular Memory, 3 – 27.
YOUNG, G. (1999). La AMIA, 1772 dı́as después [The AMIA, 1,772 days later]. Cları́n 27. 5. 1; 19.
YOUNG, J. E. (1993). The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning. New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press.

Biographical Note
Edna Aizenberg is a professor of Spanish at Marymount Manhattan College and Adjunct Professor
of Jewish Literature at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. She completed a visiting
professorship in Comparative Literature and Judaic Studies at Princeton University. Her books
include, The Aleph weaver (1984); Borges and his successors (1990); Parricide on the pampas? (2000);
and Books and bombs in Buenos Aires (2002).