There are murals on every wall of the Jrimian Armenian School in Valentín Alsina, Buenos Aires, painted by students who each year leave behind bright colors, poems, silhouettes and the imprints of small palms dipped in paint. Mothers of Plaza de Mayo stand alongside Armenian heroes, the march of deportees into the desert next to verses remembering Elena Kalaidjian. Symbols bridge distant tragedies with the same unwavering message: Memoria, Verdad y Justicia (Memory, Truth and Justice) and Nunca Más (Never Again)—slogans of Argentina’s human rights organizations that could just as easily represent the Armenian Cause.
Founded in 1930 by Armenian immigrants who fled the 1915 genocide, Jrimian Armenian School bears the name and legacy of Khrimian Hayrik. It is one of seven Armenian schools in Argentina and the only one led by the ARF-Dashnaktsutyun. Jrimian’s powerful motto represents its entire educational project: “Armenian Education for All.”
Juan Bautista Karagueuzian, general director of Jrimian, told the Weekly that they “envision an education with an Armenian identity for all families who come to our community.”
“We have moved from an Armenian education designed exclusively for Armenians, where the focus was on resisting assimilation and preserving identity while pursuing social advancement, to an Armenian education open to all families who choose it for their children,” Karagueuzian explained.
“Today, the struggle is for inclusion—in the broadest sense: educating students and their families in the values, identity and historical struggles of the Armenian people; sharing our educational experience as a tool for the social advancement of new generations and integrating Armenian culture and identity into the wider fabric of Argentine society.”
“It means not guarding something selfishly,” Sandra Raubian, principal of Jrimian’s secondary school, shared with the Weekly. “This school was founded so Armenian children could hold onto their culture after a genocide tried to erase it. But our mission grew—we want to multiply that identity by sharing it. We want every student, Armenian or not, to find a living connection with this culture that is not frozen in a museum, but alive on these walls and in these classrooms.”
That living connection is at the heart of the school’s most ambitious project: From One 24 to Another 24. Since 2008, this annual initiative has mobilized an entire generation of teachers and students to study the threads binding two dark anniversaries: April 24, 1915, the symbolic start of the Armenian Genocide, and March 24, 1976, the Argentina’s bloody military dictatorship began.
In Argentina, the dictatorship is not legally recognized as genocide because most victims were persecuted for their political beliefs, not ethnicity. Yet, countless human rights groups and historians affirm that the systematic killing and disappearance of 30,000 people, censorship and torture used the same instruments of state terror that nearly destroyed the Armenians six decades earlier.
Elena Kalaidjian was the living bridge between these horrors. Her family survived the genocide and rebuilt their lives in Argentina. She attended Jrimian as a student and, in 1976, during Argentina’s brutal dictatorship, she was detained and forcibly disappeared. She was one of 22 victims of Armenian descent during the dictatorship.
“Elena had walked our halls, shared our classrooms,” recalled Graciela Ainajyan, Jrimian’s former director of institutional management. “Her name, until then silenced, moved us deeply. In 2008, our students decided to mark her absence. They gave up part of their graduation trip funds to install a commemorative plaque. That gesture was the spark that ignited the project, From One 24 to Another 24. And from there, something much bigger was born.”
Each year since, Jrimian’s teachers gather to reimagine how to connect these dates for a new group of students. Teachers of history, Armenian culture, literature, geography, philosophy, sociology, art and even computer science sit together to prepare the project that includes discussion, dramatizations, murals, field trips and guest lectures.
María de los Ángeles García, once a student and now a literature teacher at Jrimian, remembered how these plans landed in the classroom. “The kids reshape everything,” she said. “We plan, but the students push it further. They demand we go deeper. They say, ‘Teacher, let us bring in music, let us act it out, let us invite authors, survivors, activists.’ And the school always says yes.”
In literature classes, the horrors of genocide and dictatorship are not dry facts but lived experiences through fiction. “We learned that genocide is not just numbers. It is stories, songs, families. And always, the students connect it to their own questions about justice and identity,” she explained.
“We started with murals of Armenian heroes, then the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo,” said Rubén Durumian, Jrimian’s art and Armenian language professor, referencing the historic organization of mothers and grandmothers searching for their disappeared children. “One class said, ‘We have to unite these stories.’ So, they painted scenes of the deportations, the exile. The Armenian desert merges into the Argentine dictatorship. That’s From One 24 to Another 24. It is on the walls because it has to be visible to the world.”
Each year, Jrimian students cross this bridge by reading, debating, painting, writing and performing. They hear voices like Vera Jarach, founding member of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, who lost her own daughter during the dictatorship. García still remembers the day Jarach came to Jrimian: “It was my graduating year. Vera stood with us under our murals. She told us her story. She listened to ours. It was like she handed us a torch.”
In 2019, that torch left the school’s gates and entered one of Argentina’s darkest spaces: the former Navy Mechanics School, or ESMA. For readers unfamiliar with the name, ESMA was the largest clandestine detention and torture center during Argentina’s dictatorship. Today, it is a human rights museum and memorial site. Walking through ESMA and listening to the testimonies of the survivors is chilling—similar to walking through Auschwitz or the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Cambodia.
When Jrimian’s students and teachers were invited to take their project there, it felt like a leap into the void. “It was Vera who told us, ‘This cannot stay inside the school. It has to go to ESMA,’” said Ainajyan. “And we were terrified. That place still breathes with the screams of the disappeared. But we knew we had to do it.”
Inside the ESMA’s “Cuatro Columnas” building, Jrimian students exhibited murals, pomegranates, banned books, silhouettes, a replica of Tsitsernakaberd and staged performances transforming blindfolds into the white scarves of Mothers of Plaza de Mayo. They sang, played music, painted and danced—filling a place of death and horror with art.
Andrea Picarelli, Jrimian’s head of preceptors and mother of a student, remembered standing among the murals with tears in her eyes. “It was so powerful. We could not run from what that place represented: so much darkness, so much loss. And here were our students, singing, acting, telling everyone: ‘We remember. We choose life.’”
Susana Calzoni, the literature professor whose students have driven the project forward for more than a decade, recalled that day: “When they lay down on the floor, blindfolded, they said they felt a cold that was not just cold. And when they opened their eyes, the first thing they saw was the windows, and in those windows, the faces of the disappeared. They told me, ‘We felt like we were them, just for a moment.’”
Durumian, who helped design the exhibitions and the performances, believes the project’s strength comes from balancing horror with symbolism. “At first, we were literal,” he said. “We showed too much; the horror can generate rejection in some students. So now, we work through symbols, poetry and movement. The children’s bodies move through the space, carrying the story. The school brought life where death was being designed.”
Raubian explained how teachers debate each year about how far to go: “We have learned that showing too much can paralyze the students. So, we guide them carefully. We speak about the horror, but we help them respond with art, literature and civic action. That is what makes the pain transform into something living.”
And always, the story returns to Elena Kalaidjian. Her name, once hidden, is now on a plaque at Jrimian, and her story is told every year. Her absence lives inside every mural and every performance.
“When we painted her story,” Durumian said, “we painted it alongside the deportations. It is one genocide echoing inside another. It is our students’ way of saying: ‘Never again.’”
The project does not stand alone. It is rooted in Jrimian’s broader promise: “Armenian Education for All.” Today, many Jrimian students have no Armenian ancestry. Yet, they learn Armenian words. They cook Armenian recipes. They sing Armenian songs alongside Spanish protest chants. They march every April 24 to remember the Armenian Genocide and every March 24 to remember Argentina’s disappeared.
“We had to fight for this openness,” Raubian said. “Some in the community worried that opening our doors to non-Armenians would dilute us. But we have shown the opposite—sharing this culture makes it stronger. When a student who has no Armenian grandparents chooses to learn our history, to tell our stories, to visit Armenia, prepare Armenian food: that is identity multiplied.”
“If you ask me what Armenian education for all means,” García explained, “it means that anyone, from anywhere, can come here and find belonging. It means these murals are ours to keep repainting, year after year, with new hands and new stories.”
All photos are courtesy of the author
Almost everything in this article was news to me, starting with the Armenian School named Jirnian (Khrimian), to the evolution of its educational philosophy “From one 24 to another”, to the realization of that there were 22 victims of Armenian descent during those dictatorial years and that one of them was a former student of the school, and about «Diario Armenia, the largest Armenian newspaper in Spanish founded in 1931». Thank you Matias Roubian for sharing this highly informative article.
“In Argentina, the dictatorship is not legally recognized as genocide because most victims were persecuted for their political beliefs, not ethnicity. Yet, countless human rights groups and historians affirm that the systematic killing and disappearance of 30,000 people, censorship and torture used the same instruments of state terror that nearly destroyed the Armenians six decades earlier.”
Art. 2 of the Genocide Convention and art. 6 of the Rome Statute of the ICC indicate that genocide is committed against a “national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” (We all know that political groups were excluded from the definition of genocide due to the opposition of various countries, included the Soviet Union, based on a collection of arguments that may or may not have enough merit.) Therefore, the use of the word “genocide” for actions against political opposition, regardless of the similitude of instruments of state terror and the indefensible outcome, is not legally warranted. That’s why the Rome Statute created the figure of “crime against humanity” that includes such cases. The New York Times is currently reporting about the disappearance of 100,000 (one hundred thousand) people during the thirteen years of uprising against Bashar al-Assad, that is more than three times (even four by some counts) the number of Argentineans disappeared in the late 1970s. Some of us remember the repression in Romania under Ceausescu, in Turkey under Evren, in Nicaragua under Somoza, in Uganda under Idi Amin, and many other cases all the way down to the Soviet Union under Stalin. People disappeared and were subject to censorship and torture in the same way. Should those cases be labeled as genocide? Is there any reason for Armenians to willingly offer a wide opening for the usual suspects to carve out arguments, as ridiculous as they may be, to diminish, demean, and deny what happened in 1915 as a simple case of excessive use of force against political opposition?
I guess nothing illustrates better the gradual alienation that communities endure over time, to the point that one school affiliated with the standard bearer of the Armenian liberation movement–the Dashnaktsutyun–puts on equal footing the Armenian Genocide, which completely wiped us out from the entirety of Western Armenia, with horrors we still struggle to speak about, with the brutalities and excesses of a military junta in South America. Yes, the “dirty war” in Argentina was brutal, unfair, and involved crimes against mankind. Still, the triggers of that sad chapter in Argentine history and those of the Armenian Genocide could not be farther apart. I am sure the author did not intend to give fodder to the naysayers–Turkey foremost among them–who say that it was not really a “genocide,” that Armenians were “betraying the Turkish homeland, serving foreign interests,” and that “Muslims died too.” Yet here we have a writer with an Armenian name but with very little knowledge of Armenian history, other than basic facts, who argues exactly the same, except to label both events a genocide without providing any legal or philosophical definitions to support his statements. I could not agree more with the comment signed by an Anonymous reader above. Just open a map and look at Argentina. Check out the demographic facts: it has a reasonably healthy population of +50 million or so. Yes, many struggle because of that South American country’s notoriously mismanaged economy and, more often than not, administrations of dubious integrity. Yet comparing an illegal repression that cost so many innocent lives (30,000 at most, yet official documents speak of 9,000, regardless of which each human life is precious and it’s obscene to degrade the conversation to that point) to the extermination of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire–open the atlas again and see what Western Armenia is called now and check out how many Armenians are left on those lands (Zero? Hundreds? Oh, the forcibily converted ones?) is an affront to the martyrs and to us, the descendants of Armenian Genocide survivors. This is when ideological perversions run amok, sadly a common occurrence in South American politics. It’s even sadder to see it coming from Jrimian High School, which in the 1960s and 1970s ranked among the best Armenian schools in the Diaspora. Now, they don’t even know their own–our own–history, and they shoot themselves in the foot. Probably Argentines and non-Armenians come out thinking: “So, the Armenian Genocide was something like the junta’s repression too: there was a guerrilla fighting the dictatorship and the dictatorship hit back.” Keep it up.