The DAIA, the representative organization of Argentine Jewry, today sent an appeal to President Jose Maria Guido asking him to take “immediate and effective repressive and preventative action” against “Nazi-Fascist bands” responsible for recent anti-Jewish violence which culminated this weekend in a brutal attack on a Jewish girl by neo-Nazi hoodlums who carved a swastika on her breast with a razor.
The DAIA cited the incident as an example of police laxity in a mounting number of cases of violence against Jews in Argentina. The girl, who was identified as Graciela Narcisa Sirota, 19, a student at the science faculty of Buenos Aires University, was accosted last Thursday by three hoodlums who stepped from an automobile and knocked her unconscious.
When she regained consciousness, she said, she was forced to lie on a table in an unfamiliar room where the hoodlums removed her clothes and carved the swastika on her right breast with a razor. The ruffians also inflicted severe burns on her body with the ends of lighted cigarettes, and told her: “For your guilt, Eichmann was killed. “
Miss Sirota, who fainted from the pain of the ordeal, said she later awoke in the street in a suburb of the city. The girl’s parents immediately notified the police, but their complaint was not accepted until two days later when a police physician corroborated her story.
In its protest telegram to President Guido, the DAIA declared: “We beg to denounce to Your Excellency this fact of unheard of brutality which follows a series of earlier attacks which were not punished. On the same day,” the telegram stated, “a Jewish restaurant was machine gunned for the second time. Earlier acts of vandalism are evidence of the total and intolerable lack of protection” suffered by the Jewish community.
“We request immediate and effective repressive and preventive action against the Nazi-Fascist bands which offend freely human dignity and attempt to destroy democracy and injure irremediably Argentine prestige,” the telegram concluded.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
