A new monument to commemorate the victims of the Shoah is to be built in the Argentine capital Buenos Aires and to be inaugurated in eight months’ time.
President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner met with Jewish leaders on Tuesday and gave the green light to build the monument on Shoah Square in the Palermo neighborhood of Buenos Aires, to honor the victims and as a symbol for peace.
The building of the memorial, designed by two local architects, has been in the making for the past three decades, but postponed numerous times. Around 200,000 Jews live in Argentina, and many of them are off-spring of refugees fleeing Nazi persecution. Buenos Aires has the second-largest Jewish community in the Diaspora, after New York City.
The president of the Jewish umbrella organization DAIA, Julio Schlosser, welcomed the decision to build the memorial and said this was “a special day for the Jews of Argentina.”
