KKL-JNF to plant forest in Argentina in memory of those killed at Nova music festival

The dry, rhythmic crunch of gravel beneath Gabriel Steiner’s boots sounds nothing like the thumping bassline of a desert rave, but for the Argentine-Israeli community, the association is now indelible. Standing in a sun-drenched clearing in the province of Salta, Argentina, Steiner—a local organizer—brushes the red dust from his hands. He is not looking at the desolate scrubland before him, but at the ghost of a dance floor thousands of miles away. By next year, this plot will be transformed into a living lung of green: a forest dedicated to the 364 victims of the Nova music festival massacre, an atrocity that left an open wound in the collective heart of the Jewish diaspora.

The project, spearheaded by the KKL-JNF (Keren Kayemeth LeIsrael-Jewish National Fund), serves as a profound act of cross-border mourning. For the Jewish community in Argentina, which represents the largest such population in Latin America, the tragedy in Israel felt uncomfortably intimate. Argentina has long served as a safe harbor for Jewish life, a history shaped by waves of migration fleeing European persecution throughout the 20th century. Yet, this history is also marked by trauma; the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish community center in Buenos Aires remains the deadliest terror attack in the country’s history, leaving a legacy of communal resilience that makes the current effort to plant a forest in Salta feel like a continuation of a survivalist vow.