A viral video showing a group of high school seniors in Argentina chanting antisemitic slogans during their graduation trip has prompted a wave of condemnation, including from President Javier Milei.
The video, recorded in the city of Bariloche, shows students from Escuela Humanos, a private school in Greater Buenos Aires, chanting “Today we burn Jews.” A coordinator from the travel company Baxtter appears to join in the chants.
It is common during graduation trips to the southern mountain city for tour companies to combine buses from different schools for certain excursions. Students from Escuela Humanos were traveling with students from a Jewish school, Escuela ORT.
Escuela Humanos describes itself as training “ambassadors of peace.” The school issued a lengthy statement on Monday saying that the activities captured on the video “do not represent our values,” and that school officials had been in touch with Argentina’s leading Jewish organization, DAIA. But the statement distanced the school from the incident caught on tape, saying that the tone on the bus was the responsibility of the tour company.
Baxxter told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that the coordinator would be fired and that the company would work with DAIA “to work jointly to ensure that incidents of this kind do not happen again.”
The video was reportedly taken earlier this month but went viral on Sunday after it was shared by the pro-Israel Argentine influencer Dani Lerer. It soon vaulted to national news, and Milei tweeted a two-word condemnation.
“Reprehensible. Full stop,” said Milei, himself an avowed philosemite.
The Ministry of Justice, Argentina’s Jewish political organization, and private citizens have all filed legal complaints related to the incident caught on tape.
“In the Holocaust, Jews were burned, and that was truly genocide,” DAIA president Mauro Berenstein said on a morning radio news program on Monday. “We must eradicate this type of expression, working through education, setting limits, and raising awareness.”
Ariel Gelblung, the Latin America director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said in a statement that the chants appeared to reflect an unfortunate trend.
“There is an underlying layer of antisemitism in young people that comes out when they are away from home and encounter Jewish school students for the first time,” Gelblung said. “We need to work more on the disease than on the symptom. The responsibility does not lie only with the school or the company, but also with the values taught at home.”
Bariloche is a major tourist draw within the region of Patagonia, which is both popular with Israeli backpackers and a former refuge for Nazis after World War II. The Nazi war criminal Erich Priebke served as the director of the German School of Bariloche for many years. The city is also home to a Chabad center, until recently the only synagogue in Patagonia.
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
