Published: 12 June 2020
Last updated: 4 March 2024
THE 1994 BOMBING of Buenos Aires’s AMIA Jewish Community Centre spurred Sergio Bergman, then a recently ordained Reform rabbi, into a new vocation. The tragic event that took the lives of 85 and wounded hundreds became the impetus for Bergman’s 26-year-and-counting dedication to social activism.
It is a path that eventually led him to Argentine national politics, and now Bergman is continuing his social activism in a new role: as the Israel-based president of the World Union for Progressive Judaism.
The aftermath of the 1994 bombing was “really traumatic, but also a turning point in my life,” Bergman related on The Times of Israel Podcast from his Buenos Aires home under coronavirus lockdown.
Although the third of his four children had just been born, he said that after he saw his wife and child safely home from the hospital he spent the next 10 days in the morgue, identifying members of his Jewish community so the families could bury them and begin official mourning.
Weeks later, realizing that next to nothing was being done to bring the perpetrators to justice, he co-founded the Memoria Activa foundation, which until today protests at the Supreme Court, a few doors down from the first synagogue of the Argentine Republic.
FULL STORY Activist, politician, rabbi: Sergio Bergman takes the helm of Progressive Jewry (Times of Israel)
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