Proyecto Aprendiz: Reimagining Holocaust Memory and Meaning for the Second and Third Generation in Argentina

• In Event: New Generations of Holocaust Memory in Latin America

Abstract

Argentina–home to the largest Jewish community in Latin America–is a nation with multiple histories of violence and loss, including the 1976-1983 dictatorship
(considered a genocide by recent scholars), and the 1994 bombing of the Argentine Jewish Mutual Aid Society, an antisemitic terrorist attack that killed 85 people and wounded hundreds, and thirty years later, still remains in a state of impunity. Within this context, Jewish memory has been an important space for negotiating belonging, both at the community level and at the level of political agency and new forms of citizenship in the public sphere. In the aftermath of the AMIA bombing, new organizations developed that engaged Jewish memory and practice, including social movements like Memoria Activa (Active Memory). It also witnessed the rise of Niños de la Shoá (Child Survivors of the Shoah) which eventually became the organization Generations of the Shoah. In addition to creating a space for survivors, this group also developed innovative forms of transmission of testimony through its Proyecto Aprendiz (Apprentice Project). In recent years, the pandemic and new waves of antisemitism have resituated the significance of Holocaust memory for imagining and reimagining Jewish Argentine futures. Using Marianne Hirsch’s framework of post-memory, this paper draws on ethnographic research with the second and third generation in Buenos Aires to examine how descendants of Holocaust survivors in Argentina have reimagined testimony and its transmission in ways that build new forms of belonging. In this way, I argue that these new generations of Holocaust memory have become important sites of negotiating Jewish Argentine subjectivity in the public sphere.

Author

• Natasha Zaretsky, New York University