(JTA) — Two senior officials at the heart of Iran’s military and national security establishment are among the eight people set to face trial in absentia over their alleged roles in the 1994 terrorist bombing of the AMIA Jewish community center in Buenos Aires.

Argentine Federal Judge Daniel Rafecas issued the 648-page ruling Monday, formally processing the suspects and ordering an asset freeze of up to $500 million for each of them. The ruling attributes different roles to the suspects, ranging from senior Iranian officials who allegedly made and facilitated the decision to carry out the attack to individuals accused of providing diplomatic and operational support.

Ahmad Vahidi, the current commander-in-chief of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and Mohsen Rezaei, secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, are among seven Iranian citizens and one Lebanese national formally charged in the case.

The other defendants are former Iranian intelligence minister Ali Fallahian; former foreign minister Ali Akbar Velayati; former Iranian diplomat Hadi Soleimanpour; former cultural attaché in Buenos Aires Mohsen Rabbani; former embassy official Ahmad Reza Asghari; and alleged Hezbollah operative Salman Raouf Salman, also known as Samuel Salman El Reda.

 

 

The judge charged the defendants with aggravated homicide and injuries motivated by racial or religious hatred. He classified the bombing as both a crime against humanity and an act of genocide.

The July 18, 1994 bombing of the AMIA building killed 85 people and injured over 300, remaining the deadliest terrorist attack in Argentine history.

The ruling was handed down after almost seven months of Iran’s war with the U.S. and Israel, with the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program at the center of international debate.

Argentine President Javier Milei, known for his pro-Israel views, noted the prosecution in his remarks Wednesday at the annual U.N. General Assembly, and placed it in the context of the threat he said Iran poses to the West.

“We have also made a geopolitical choice: We have aligned ourselves unequivocally with the West, with the United States and with Israel — countries with which we share a deep affinity of values and strategic complementarity,” he said.  “That is why we condemn the Iranian regime’s attacks on the State of Israel, we have designated Iran’s Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organization, and continue to seek justice for the two attacks carried out on Argentine soil in 1992 and 1994.”

The indictments followed a unanimous ruling also on Monday by the federal appeals court upholding the constitutionality of applying Argentina’s trial-in-absentia law⁠ to the AMIA case. The legislation, enacted in 2025, allows proceedings involving terrorism and crimes against humanity to continue when defendants deliberately evade Argentine justice.

The Jewish umbrella organization DAIA welcomed the decision. “Thirty-two years after the bombing of the AMIA-DAIA building, Argentina’s courts have taken a major step in the pursuit of truth and justice,” it said in a post on X. The post featured photos of the suspects formally charged by an Argentine judge under the headline “Historic Event.”

AMIA in a statement posted Tuesday said the decision marks “a decisive milestone in establishing the truth about the worst terrorist attack suffered by our country.” The trial date has not yet been set, but experts quoted by Argentine media estimate that it will take place next year. It would be the first trial in absentia in Argentina’s history.

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

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(JTA) — Nearly two dozen Jewish Democrats in Congress signed a letter opposing plans to fold the State Department’s standalone Holocaust envoy office into the office of Rabbi Yehuda Kaploun, the Trump administration’s special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism.

Kaploun has been pushing for the merger for months, and his efforts have divided Jewish leaders over the future of Holocaust diplomacy. Supporters of the move claimed that it would improve efficiency, while critics said it would flatten the attention given to Holocaust-specific issues, and criticized it as a power grab by Kaploun.

Opposition to the plan escalated Wednesday when 19 members of Congress, in a letter shared exclusively with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, called for Secretary of State Marco Rubio to preserve the Holocaust envoy as “a distinct, permanent office led by a dedicated career State Department official.”

The officials, who are all members of the Congressional Jewish Caucus, wrote that the two offices “are complementary, but they are not interchangeable.” Kaploun’s office is “responsible for confronting contemporary antisemitism around the world,” the letter reads, while the Holocaust envoy’s office “focuses on Holocaust-era restitution, historical justice, remembrance, and accountability.”

Signatories on the letter include moderate Democrats such as Reps. Jared Moskowitz and Josh Gottheimer, and progressives including Reps. Jamie Raskin and Jan Schakowsky.

New York Rep. Jerry Nadler, who co-led the letter with Illinois Rep. Brad Schneider, said back in June that the potential move was “abominable” and a “vain attempt to consolidate power by Yehuda Kaploun.”

“If supporting Holocaust victims and their families was a priority to this Administration, they would seek further opportunities to support SEHI, not to eliminate it,” said Nadler, the House’s longest-serving Jewish member, using the acronym for the Holocaust envoy office.

Wednesday’s letter called for Rubio to not only preserve the role, which is currently vacant, but also to “immediately appoint a new Special Envoy for Holocaust Issues.” Rubio has not named a successor to Ellen Germain, whose term ended on July 31 after she took over in August 2021.

Germain notably emphasized the need for European nations to sustain remembrance of the Holocaust and their roles in its perpetration; top Trump administration figures, including Vice President JD Vance, have said that the current intensity of Holocaust commemoration in Europe is counterproductive.

A group of Jewish organizations, including the Anti-Defamation League, American Jewish Committee and B’nai Brith International, had called on Rubio to fill the impending vacancy back in April. Doing so, the groups wrote, would “demonstrate the prioritization that the United States ascribes to preserving the uniqueness of the Holocaust through this special office,” and “ensure that its critical work continues.”

A separate host of Jewish groups, including the Combat Antisemitism Movement, the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America, the World Jewish Congress and Chabad-Lubavitch World Headquarters, had called for Rubio to go ahead with the merger in June to increase efficiency and avoid “duplicative efforts” by the two offices.

The Jewish Democrats’ letter this week refuted that argument.

“Combining them would not streamline efficiency or eliminate any meaningful duplication; it would risk diminishing the focus, experience, and institutional capacity necessary for each,” the letter reads.

The post Jewish Dems in Congress oppose plans to merge Holocaust and antisemitism envoys appeared first on The Forward.

(JTA) — A Jewish public school teacher and pro-Palestinian advocate in Philadelphia has admitted to fabricating Palestinian, Tunisian and Black heritage to her colleagues for years, in a case that some online commenters are dubbing “the Palestinian Rachel Dolezal.”

Hannah Gann posted confessions and apologies to social media this week, following confrontations from local pro-Palestinian groups she had worked with. In her apologies, she identified herself as “a white woman with significant privilege and wealth” who has “no Palestinian or Tunisian heritage.”

A Jewish Telegraphic Agency request for comment to Gann was not immediately returned.

Two local activist groups Gann had been involved with, Philly Educators for Palestine and Racial Justice Organizing Committee, said in their own statement that Gann was also “of Jewish heritage and [part of] an Israeli settler family.” They further accused Gann of falsely claiming to be Black at various points, until they confronted her about her background days ago.

Comparisons to Dolezal, a white woman who posed as Black for years, taught Africana college courses and held a leadership role with a local NAACP branch before being exposed in 2015, spread over the Internet on Wednesday.

“I hid the truth or outright lied about my background to everyone in my life,” Gann, a teacher at West Philadelphia’s The Workshop School, said in her own Instagram video message on Monday. “I hid my family’s background from everyone in Philly and also hid from the people in my own family what I was doing.”

Neither of Gann’s visible social media apologies mentioned Jewish heritage. But the Philadelphia Inquirer, citing internal documents from the activist groups, reported that she had identified herself in college as a “Jewish woman with family in the occupied West Bank.”

Gann had also told colleagues her grandfather was born in Palestine, when he was reportedly born in Baltimore, according to documents cited by the Inquirer. Fellow activists accused her of having darkened her skin using makeup and fake tanner and adopting a Black American accent after returning from a stint in the Peace Corps in Rwanda.

As with Dolezal, commenters accused Gann of posing as a member of a marginalized group of color to gain clout.

“When marginalization becomes a form of social currency some people will always do this,” one account under the name “regretmaxxing” wrote in Gann’s comments.

Gann had made the pro-Palestinian cause central to her identity over the years, including a teach-in at her school in 2024 to protest “scholasticide” in Gaza, the Inquirer reported. That year she also told a local media outlet that the right-wing group Accuracy in Media had displayed her name on a truck calling her “Philadelphia’s Leading Antisemite.”

Accuracy in Media, which has targeted activists in other states using similar methods, confirmed to JTA that they had also done so to Gann.

“Hannah Gann remains one of Philadelphia’s leading antisemites,” the group’s founder, Adam Guillette, said in a statement, linking to a video of his group’s truck displaying the message outside the school where Gann worked.

Delivering testimony to the Philadelphia Board of Education in December 2025, Gann, wearing a keffiyeh, urged them to “treat Islamophobia, anti-Black and anti-Palestinian racism just as seriously as you treat allegations of antisemitism.”

“Why are Jewish staff members’ experiences immediately assumed to indicate systemic failures, while Black, brown and Muslim students’ testimonies are treated as isolated incidents?” she continued, shortly before a board member cut off her mic.

A fellow teacher of Gann’s said on Instagram that Gann had told her, following a trip to Israel in 2023, that she had both Jewish and Palestinian people in her family, later claiming that her grandfather had been an anti-Zionist Jew born in Mandatory Palestine who left over disagreements with the direction of Israel.

“We will no longer work with Hannah, and she will no longer be welcome in any of our organizing spaces,” the pro-Palestinian groups said in their own statement.

A biography of Gann still visible on the West Philly Participatory Defense Hub, a different local organizing group, describes her as having “loved ones directly impacted by the criminal (in)justice system” and notes that she is a member of The First Unitarian Church.

In her apology, which she posted on Yom Kippur, Gann argued that her advocacy was genuine even though her persona was not.

“The fact that I lied about who I was does not mean anyone else who speaks up for Palestine is lying and does not erase the urgency of listening to voices on the ground,” she said. She added that she would be “deleting anything posted by Zionists.”

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