20,000 Honor Warsaw Ghetto Fighters at Buenos Aires Meeting

A record turnout of more than 20,000 people packed the Luna Park Stadium here for a Warsaw Ghetto uprising commemoration and heard a warning from an Argentine Jewish leader that 20 years after that revolt “a sick spirit paralyzes humanity, fabricating a smokescreen over the neo-Nazi groups which sprout internationally.”

The warning was delivered by Dr. Isaac Goldenberg, president of the DAIA, central representative body of Argentine Jewry, which arranged the commemoration. So filled was the stadium that thousands of Jews who sought admittance had to be turned away for lack of room.

Among those who heard Dr. Goldenberg’s warning were Oscar Alenda, chairman of the Frondizi party, and Arturo Illia, presidential candidate in the next elections of the Union Civica Radical Del Pueblo. Almost all political parties sent messages to the gathering, condemning racism. The event was widely covered by the press and television.

Dr. Goldenberg declared that “humanity turned its face from these dying men, concurring in complicity with their assassins. The western democracies only started to fight when the blood arrived on their very thresholds.”

Referring to those he called guilty of a “complicity of silence and inaction” over current neo-Nazi outbreaks, Dr. Goldenberg told the throng that “those naive accomplices still have not learned the lesson of history. The Warsaw Ghetto fighters showed the world that totalitarianism eventually overpowers life and the honor of all without distinction as to creed or color.”

Dr. Alfred Palacios, veteran socialist leader, told the meeting that Jewish and non-Jewish Argentine youth should join to extirpate anti-Semitic outbreaks in Argentina. Father Raphael Lopez Jordan, secretary of the Catholic University here, called on Argentine youth to resist totalitarianism and to unite around “positive things and to educate themselves democratically.”