The aftermath of the 1994 car-bombing of the AMIA Jewish center in Buenos Aires. Monday marked the 22nd anniversary of the bombing. Photo: Wikipedia.

JNS.org – Argentine President Mauricio Macri and members of his cabinet on Monday attended a ceremony marking the 22nd anniversary of the AMIA Jewish center bombing in Buenos Aires. Eighty-five people were killed and hundreds were wounded in that bombing on July 18, 1994.

Authorities have widely believed that Iran is responsible for what is seen as the worst bombing in the country’s history. It occurred at 9:53 a.m. when a car bomb exploded outside of the Jewish center building.

The ceremony for the 22nd anniversary of the bombing featured the motto “memory unites us” and included the public reading of the names of each of the 85 victims.

“There is an obligation to tell what happened,” said AMIA Vice President Ralph Thomas Saieg, according to the World Jewish Congress.

“The terrorists who planted the bomb…simply wanted to destroy the symbol for solidarity that is the AMIA and thus hurt us all as Argentineans,” he said, calling on Argentina’s justice minister, Germán Garavano, to continue to investigate the bombing.

Meanwhile, in Buenos Aires, 250 experts and parliamentarians from 17 countries gathered for the biennial Global Forum for Combating Anti-Semitism to assess the state of global anti-Semitism and to discuss social and governmental responses. The forum has been organized by the Hispanic Israel Leadership Coalition — a subsidiary of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference; the Israeli Foreign Ministry; and the World Jewish Congress through its regional chapter, the Latin American Jewish Congress.