“The Culture That the Terrorists Wished to Destroy”: The Rescue of IWO Collections After the 1994 AMIA Bombing

The death of Alberto Nisman, the Argentinean federal prosecutor who was investigating the terrorist attack on the AMIA building in Buenos Aires in1994, in which 85 people died and many rare and irreplaceable collections of IWO (the Argentinean branch of YIVO in existence since 1928) were destroyed, has drawn renewed international attention to this unsolved crime. IWO was located on two floors of the building that was bombed.

In this difficult, contentious time in Argentinean history, we take inspiration from a documentary posted on IWO’s website, Rodolfo Compte’s The Young Who Preserved Our Memory, which chronicles the work of young volunteers who worked after the attack to recover books, documents, and artifacts from the wreckage.

In an introduction to the film on the IWO website, Compte, a writer and journalist, writes

On Monday July 18, 1994, the bloodiest terrorist attack in Argentinean history was carried out. At 9:53 a powerful bomb split in two the building of the Jewish Argentine Mutual Association (AMIA), located at 633 Pasteur Street, in the city of Buenos Aires. As a result of the explosion 85 people died and more than 300 people were injured. After the attack, and while aid workers were rescuing the wounded and dead from this brutal attack, eight hundred young people, Jews and non-Jews, Argentineans and foreigners, volunteered to recover the cultural inheritance of the IWO (Institute for Jewish Research) from the wreckage. The IWO operated on the 3rd and 4th floor of the building at 633 Pasteur Street, safeguarding miles of books, art collections, records, paintings, unique Judaica pieces and testimony of the events of the Holocaust and Jewish resistance in the Second World War. All the volunteers, whether young people or adults, worked ceaselessly during the months that followed, facing unimaginable adversity and an absolutely hostile environment. Amid cold, rain, new bomb threats, interruptions and in a place filled with sadness, death and pain. The young people and adults in these somber hours of Argentinean history provided the hope, solidarity and optimism necessary to preserve the culture that the terrorists wished to destroy. But the volunteers did not rescue only to rescue. They did it, fundamentally, to preserve what there was to pass on—history and memory—to future generations. They knew very well what they were doing and why, for what, and for whom.

[Translation from Spanish by Leah Falk.]

View the film on YouTube.