The Renault Van at 9:53 in the Morning

Half a century after the Shoah. The State of Israel had been born on the other side of that catastrophe, in 1948, and had become the political center of Jewish life. But the diaspora was still huge, and it was still soft in places. Argentina had the largest Jewish community in Latin America — some two hundred thousand people, built up over a century of immigration from Eastern Europe, from the Sephardi Mediterranean, and from the trickle of survivors who had come south after 1945.

At the heart of that community was the AMIA — Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina — a seven-story building on Calle Pasteur in downtown Buenos Aires. It held the community's archives, including many of Argentina's own Holocaust-survivor testimonies. It housed the welfare offices, the chevra kadisha, the schools' administration, the cultural institute. On a Monday morning it was full of people at their desks.

Two years earlier, in March 1992, a car bomb had destroyed the Israeli embassy across town, killing twenty-nine. No one was ever convicted. Investigators — Israeli, Argentine, American — traced the operation to Hezbollah operatives working under Iranian direction, in revenge for an Israeli strike against Hezbollah's secretary-general in Lebanon.

At 9:53 on the morning of the eighteenth of July, a Renault Trafic van packed with about 275 kilograms of ammonium-nitrate explosive was detonated by a suicide driver directly in front of the AMIA building. The front of the building pancaked, floor onto floor, crushing the people at their desks. Eighty-five were killed. More than three hundred were wounded. Rescue crews worked the rubble by hand for days, listening for voices under the concrete.

The date was not an accident for the attackers, and it was not an accident for the community. It was the eve of the ninth of Av. It was, to the day, two years after the destruction of the embassy.

In the decades since, arrest warrants would be issued for senior Iranian officials — including a former Iranian president and defense minister. None would ever stand trial. In January 2015, the Argentine special prosecutor, Alberto Nisman, who had spent his career on the case and was about to testify before Congress about an alleged government cover-up, would be found shot dead in his apartment the night before he was to appear.

The AMIA bombing is still the deadliest antisemitic attack anywhere in the world since the Second World War. It was a reminder that even in the diaspora furthest from any front line, the ninth of Av still has the power to gather sorrow to itself.