Unforgiven

Buenos Aires, Argentine autumn of 1994. In his office at the Argentina Zionist Organization (AZO), director Itzik Horn left two copies of the blueprint of the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina (AMIA) Jewish community center where he would be moving his offices. José Pérez, secretary of the AZO, and also an infiltrated intelligence agent of the Federal Police, discreetly took one of the copies.

In the first week of July, Pérez and Horn visited the AMIA building, in the heart of Once, the city’s Jewish neighborhood, to oversee construction on the AZO’s new offices. Pérez then traveled to Basabilvaso, a town in the central Entre Rios province. On July 18, by chance, he saw on the Crónica news channel one of its catastrophe headlines: “AMIA Bombed.” In what was then the worst attack on a Jewish site since the end of the Shoah, 85 people died and 300 were wounded.

Pérez was immediately afraid. First, for the life of his wife, a Hebrew teacher and community activist, who was supposed to be at AMIA to collect some teaching materials; luckily, he reached her at home, having not yet left. After blowing through the 300 kilometers separating Basabilvaso from the Argentine capital, Pérez saw the victims’ mangled bodies in the morgue. Two days later, he enlisted in an elite group created to defend Jews from another attack in the country with the largest Jewish population in Latin America.

Pérez had nine years of active community life at this point, almost the same amount of time he had served as an infiltrated agent. He had passed information on people and institutions in the Jewish community, building plans and blueprints, and all the information he had collected about the country’s main Jewish association, according to his own legal testimony, which I consulted for this article.

From the AMIA bombing on, according to his version of events, he has felt an unbearable guilt for having funneled material that might have served in planning the attack or in the bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires in March 1992, which resulted in 22 people killed and more than 240 wounded. In both cases—the embassy and the AMIA bombings—Pérez delivered building characteristics, access points, hours, schedules, security systems, weak points, and methods for entering and exiting without detection. He himself entered both buildings several times before and after the attacks.

Given his particular circumstance of being a Catholic in the process of converting to Judaism and a salaried employee of the Federal Police, he began to contemplate testifying about his infiltration and the information he provided. He waited for 20 years, he said, because of his distrust of the Argentine justice system and the judicial authorities who carried out the investigation.

In July 2014, journalist Gabriel Levinas revealed Pérez’s identity, against his wishes. The spy was then deposed by the prosecutor Alberto Nisman, who was investigating the AMIA attack, and was immediately entered into a witness protection program for nearly a decade. In that new life, Pérez saw the Amazon Prime Video series that carries his name—Iosi: The Regretful Spy—which is a liberally fictionalized interpretation of his personal and professional journey.

In December 2023, Pérez decided to exit the witness protection program, a fact confirmed by sources in the Ministry of Justice. Pérez maintained that with the rise of Javier Milei, a U.S.-aligned anarcho-capitalist, security policies have allowed for the return of bad people, namely advisers of Security Minister Patricia Bullrich and others who had pressured him to keep quiet and not testify.

Today, Pérez considers himself both a Jew and a Zionist. But in reality, he belongs to no world: excommunicated from the Federal Police for his accusations of a coverup of the attacks, and rejected by the Jewish community for having been an infiltrated agent. He is a pariah without protection. His family and personal life, says one person who has his full trust, has completely collapsed: He lives totally isolated, consumed by paranoia and fear that he will be executed.

Although the illegal repression was principally done by the Army and Marines, there was participation by the Federal Police. The viciousness of the campaign against Jewish detainees or disappeared is recorded in the book Never Again, a summary of the investigation by the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons that was fundamental to the trial of the military junta in 1985. One of the Jews detained by the regime was the famous editor and journalist Jacobo Timerman, who later went into exile in New York and Tel Aviv. In his canonical book Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number, he recounts how his torturers and interrogators would ask him about the “Andinia plan,” an antisemitic legend about a supposed Jewish plan to take over the vast territory of Patagonia in the south, in order to found a new nation.

A few months after the end of the military dictatorship, 23-year-old Pérez, the son of a sailor and housewife from a middle-class Buenos Aires family, joined the police. There he learned that the Andinia plan was part of the coursework taught in intelligence training school, where he studied for five years. “The Intelligence division modeled itself on the intelligence services of Nazi Germany,” he wrote in The Repentant Spy, the working title of the book by journalists Horacio Lutzky and Miriam Lewin (with some chapters written by Pérez in the first person) that was the basis for the Amazon series, and which is scheduled to be published in the United States in early 2025.

Pérez lived with the antisemitism of his professors and even that of his colleagues. Two of them asked him if his name wasn’t Peres instead of Pérez, in reference to Israel’s then-president, Shimon Peres. His first alias was Jorge Polak.

At the beginning of his career, his handler asked him if he would be up for infiltrating Zionist university groups. Pérez thought that his physical traits might help him. He saw in his own skin the Sephardi archetype and imagined that his nose and thick-lipped mouth might make others believe he had been born in Israel. He set out to study Jewish religion, culture, and traditions, and over time learned Hebrew.

Many years later, he recalled in The Repentant Spy, he would obtain in writing the precise instructions of his superiors: “All the activities of the groups and leaders should be reported … the essence is to discover how the Jews organized to advance their goal of conquering Argentinian land and converting Patagonia in one more of its domains, according to the Andinia Plan.”

Pérez started by infiltrating Hebraica, a secular Jewish club, to which he gained access without difficulty. He kept his name Pérez, saying that his mother was Jewish, last name Jacob, which figured in the lists of the Zionist Organization of Argentina. Then he joined Jativa, a right-wing Jewish youth group. In one of Jativa’s activities, in which youth and Zionist groups from Latin America participated, Pérez got ahold of a key to the AMIA building. That was eight years before the attack. The key allowed him to enter the community center, including at night, without anyone knowing about it. “My superiors would jealously guard that information,” he noted.

After Jativa he moved on to a group further on the right, Tagar (“challenge,” in Hebrew). In Tagar he undertook his first street action, painting “Palestinos Asesinos” (Palestinian Killers) in the vicinity of a pro-Palestinian event in a central neighborhood of Buenos Aires. Infiltration required acting skills and convincing explanations for any doubts that might have arisen about his invented biography. While in Tagar, he was asked for the name of the veterinarian in the town in Entre Rios he had said he was from and he couldn’t answer, which worried him. He decided to move on to another group to avoid any further suspicion.

Pérez then joined a group of progressive Jews that met in the Once neighborhood. Since the group had only two or three activists, he moved on to another progressive group, Tzavta (“joining together,” in Hebrew). Since that group was also about to dissolve for lack of members, he set out to build it up through calls and persuasion. In a few months he had done so. One of its members, Andy Faur, was an active community leader of progressive organizations from 1988 to 1992, until he made aliyah with his family a year later. Faur spoke to me via Zoom from his house in Jerusalem where he works as a sociologist and educator.

“Iosi was a good person: reserved, dedicated, agreeable, sociable. He knew quite a bit about Israel, about Jewish people and institutions in Argentina, and he could sustain a conversation about those topics. He wanted to be part of the community. We would see each other in Tzavta and he would say that he worked in the bakery Los Dos Chinos as an administrator, but I never visited him at work. We both attended the weekly meeting of the AZO.”

On the day of the attack on the Israeli Embassy, Faur came running to the site and found Pérez there. “We saved wounded people and, especially, we collected papers into bags to take them to the embassy’s security people,” he recalled.

After that, Pérez got stricter with security in Tzavta. He asked to have the façade of the building changed because he thought there were too many windows. “He became someone that everyone trusted,” Faur said.

As his standing in the community grew, Pérez began to feel that he was being watched by the Federal Police. He wondered if they saw him as a double agent. Shortly after, the Informador Publico, a publication rife with information from the intelligence services, published his report on a meeting in the Israeli Embassy in which they had decided to take greater security measures. The leak put him in danger, and for this reason, according to him, he asked to resign from the police. They did not accept his resignation.

His relations with his superiors would continue to deteriorate, especially after the AMIA attack and after Pérez joined the community’s self-defense groups. “My bosses started getting suspicious when they would ask me for names and training places and I would reply evasively. They demoted me, gave me bureaucratic tasks, and I began to fear they would kill me,” he wrote in The Repentant Spy. He recorded a video in which he blamed the Federal Police in case he should end up assassinated, and he collected evidence of his work: documents, credentials, and anything that proved his connection to the institution.

At the beginning of 2024 I put in a formal request with the Federal Police to get their version of the case. They directed me to the Institutional Image Division. Some of the questions I had: Is it true that Pérez was a member of Argentina’s Federal Police? Is it true that his superiors asked him to infiltrate the Jewish community and that since then, 1985, for 15 years he sent regular reports up the chain? Is it true that he provided a blueprint of the AMIA building to his superiors weeks before the terrorist attack of 1994?

Four weeks later, after following up, the Institutional Image Division sent this answer: “We regret to inform you that on this occasion it will not be possible to provide information and/or answer, since it is sensitive information.”

Lutzky has studied the judicial cases as a lawyer and representative of AMIA and he has published two books. Based on the files, he says that on the day of the attack, the police in charge of security at the Israeli Embassy left their post before the arrival of the next shift, which arrived late. Also, he claims that prosecutors and judges ignored the police helicopter that flew over AMIA the night before the attack. Lutzky concluded that the zone around AMIA had been deliberately cleared by Federal Police; that is, they had stopped controlling and watching so that others could act.

In February 2000, Lutzky’s assistant told him that her ex-husband wanted to meet with him.

“I’m not who you think I am,” Pérez told him in that first encounter, according to the then-director of New Zion. “I’m an intelligence officer, infiltrated into various community institutions, collecting information over many years.”

At first, Lutzky and Pérez would meet in secret, and Pérez would recount some of the details of his work, but without ever wanting to come clean before the law. And not without reason.

From the outset, the handling of the AMIA case was mired by scandal and charges of corruption. The judge in charge of the case, Juan José Galeano, followed the theory that a van was used in the bombing, which implicated Carlos Telleldin, a stolen-car chop-shop guy and son of an antisemitic policeman, who had allegedly delivered the vehicle to the attackers. However, Galeano’s chief aide, Claudio Lifschitz, testified that the judge mishandled the case and offered a $400,000 bribe to Telleldin for him to accuse the Buenos Aires Provincial Police of having brought in the van, in addition to other scandalous irregularities.

Argentina’s courts have ruled on Iran’s responsibility in the attack, but the state has never arrested nor tried the attackers. The only people to go to jail were Galeano and the prosecutors involved in that first trial. Sent by AMIA, Lutzky attended these trials and followed the details of the case. He concluded that Pérez “was the living, secret proof of the security and intelligence forces’ spying on Jewish institutions before the attack on AMIA.”

“I think that, without realizing it, I might have contributed to the attacks,” he said, breaking down in tears, as Lewin recalled.

They would meet again over several months in different locations. Pérez would change his appearance: at times shaven, at others wearing a beard, sunglasses, longer sideburns, a mustache, dyed hair.

Pérez decided to introduce Lewin to Lutzky, and they started to work together. At some point in 2004 Lutzky and Lewin met with Senator Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, who at the time was also first lady of Argentina and would go on to be the country’s two-term president (2007-15). She suggested, according to the journalists, that they testify before the prosecutor Alberto Nisman, whom she had given political and financial support to push forward with the investigation. But Pérez didn’t trust Nisman, so Fernández de Kirchner sent them to speak with Jaime Stiuso, the controversial strongman of the state intelligence service (the Secretariat of Intelligence, commonly known by the Spanish acronym SIDE). State intelligence found Pérez’s account not credible.

With no other way to testify before Argentine justice, the trio started to think about telling the story through a documentary in another country, which might allow Pérez to live elsewhere for a period of time. Lewin contacted her close friend, the journalist Gabriel Isaías Levinas, who had written a book about the AMIA attack and had been hired by the Delegation of Israelite Associations in Argentina (Spanish acronym DAIA), the main Jewish entity, to assess the judicial investigation. Levinas had contacts in the American Jewish Committee (AJC) and could help facilitate Pérez’s testimony overseas and his eventual move. In 2008, Levinas and Lewin, according to their account, met in Buenos Aires with a representative of the AJC in charge of Latin American affairs, Dina Siegel, and the AJC’s lawyer, along with two Argentine businessmen who would be underwriting the $30,000 needed to finance Pérez’s semester abroad. Ultimately the AJC never approved the project.

There are two versions of what happened next. According to Pérez, Lewin, and Lutzky, the spy agreed to a recorded interview with Levinas that was not to be made public. Levinas then broke that agreement.

Levinas gives the opposite version. He invited me into his apartment in Once, three blocks from the AMIA, on a Saturday in April, when the neighborhood’s many businesses—textile, mostly—and the noise of the bustling Corrientes Avenue are quiet. He was wearing black shorts and sneakers and was smoking a cigar. “Like with all intelligence agents I didn’t know if Pérez wanted to give me information, or get some out of me. He was playing the victim, but turning back: He would say go ahead and then not. For years it went on like that,” he told me.

“According to Pérez, Lewin, and Lutzky, that video was for keepsake and not to be published,” I responded.

“I’m a reporter, and I recorded that interview with a camera this big”—and made a gesture like he was holding up a cat in his hands. “It’s my word against theirs. I decided to include it in my new book because of Iosi’s delays and because enough time had passed. He also might have been saying that to cover himself. It was a crime: infiltrating the Jewish community and passing AMIA plans. He is potentially an accomplice in the attack.”

Levinas took out a thumb drive and opened his laptop. His walls were covered with paintings; besides being a journalist, he is also an art dealer. I realized that I was sitting at the same table where Pérez had sat to record the video.

In the video, Pérez, appearing slight and wearing a checkered shirt, speaks about his youthful interest in planes and his wish to join the Air Force. But chance, geographic proximity, and a policeman relative made it so that he ended up in the Federal Police. He speaks about his years of infiltration while smoking a cigarette. In the new edition of his book, Levinas admits to having “decided unilaterally to publish” fragments of that interview that he would later use to promote the book.

Before the book launch, Lutzky met with the undersecretary for criminal policy, Juan Martín Mena, to alert him about the case and ask him to put Pérez in the witness protection program once the story came out. According to Mena, he agreed on the condition that Pérez testify in Nisman’s AMIA case, even if he was skeptical of the story.

On the first Friday in July 2014, after some excerpts from the book were published in La Nacion newspaper, Pérez urgently presented himself to Nisman’s prosecutorial office. After an hour and a half—too short of a time given the relevance of the testimony—they sent him home.

That afternoon, Pérez entered the witness protection program at Nisman’s request that he be protected. Dario Diaz, who headed the program at the time, alerted Mena to the seriousness and importance of the testimony. Late that night, Mena got the number of the head of Police Intelligence and called him. When he asked if José Pérez was a member of the Federal Police, the official didn’t answer. Mena interpreted his silence as confirmation.

Pérez stayed in the government office until 6 a.m. He would testify, cry, testify some more, cry some more, and plead that Levinas’ video should not be made public, and then cry again. He had to abandon his past life without any chance to say his goodbyes to anyone. He put what he could into a suitcase and bag and turned in the rest, including his washing machine, TV, and freezer. Mena waited for the news of the interview to set off an international conflict given the implications of the Federal Police having spied on the Jewish community for 15 years. But nothing happened.

Nisman never called him back to testify again. Instead, his investigation was focused on the Iranian trail, and in denouncing the government of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner for covering up Iran’s involvement in the attack. Six months later, he denounced Kirchner for treason. The weekend before Nisman was set to testify about his findings before the Argentine Congress he was found dead in his apartment. The ensuing scandal was so large that it was featured on 60 Minutes. Although the court ruled Nisman’s death a homicide, neither those responsible nor any key clues were ever found.

After testifying to Nisman, Pérez and his girlfriend were relocated to the outskirts of an unidentified town near a river. He worked on his Russian and German and avoided places with security cameras. He went unarmed and trusted in what he had learned in an anti-kidnapping class taught by the IDF. Then he decided to move to the Atlantic coast and buy himself a pitbull. He would run on the beach every morning. In another town he tried getting some psychological help under the program’s umbrella, but the mental health professional told on him to her friends and he had to leave.

His son and his son’s girlfriend also had to enter the protection program, changing their residence, work, and friends. The relationship with his son became strained. The spy was wracked with guilt over the life he had given his son. He could not be at the side of his own father, who had been newly diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, which killed him shortly thereafter.

From the day Levinas’ story exposing Pérez was published, news of his betrayal traveled to hundreds of members of the Argentine Jewish community, on whom he had spied for 15 years.

“When I heard the news I felt, first, a great sadness because I had a lot of affection for him and his wife. I also felt angry because it was nothing short of a betrayal,” said Mauricio Balter, the rabbi with whom Pérez began his conversion to Judaism. The rabbi spoke to me over Zoom and later by video call from his office in Jerusalem where he serves as executive director of Masorti Olami and MERCAZ Olami. Born in Uruguay in 1957, he had spent a lot of time in Buenos Aires where he was the first director of the Masorti movement in Argentina before making aliyah with his family in 1995.

Balter told me that he got to know Pérez in the temple on Pavon Street, in Flores, a lower-middle-class neighborhood of Buenos Aires where the spy had grown up. During all of 1991, Balter saw him twice a week: in a study group and on Shabbat. Pérez, in the eyes of the rabbi, was fully part of the community. “José, over that year, said just enough. He wouldn’t speak much, but what he said was well-thought. He was neither charismatic nor expansive,” he said. “In my 41 years of being a rabbi some of the people who have asked to convert to Judaism I’ve had my doubts about, or suspicions that caused me not to move forward with them. But José, he never once caused any suspicion in me.”

As he spoke with me about Pérez, Balter didn’t sound angry. He seemed sad. “He infiltrated thinking that the threat was us, the Jews, and later he realized that the threat was others; the ones who had sent him to spy on us were the dangerous ones,” he told me.

Pérez never completed his conversion. According to him, he couldn’t handle the cost of circumcision, and, ever since the Israeli Embassy attack, his life had become impossible.

Moisés Dulfano met Pérez in the winter of 1994 in a Buenos Aires singles group for 30-to-45-year-olds that met Fridays at 10 p.m. They would watch and discuss movies, or attend lectures in the local cafes. Dulfano, a secular Jew who had studied social psychology, was 40 and had just lost his job at the Banco Provincia. “When I saw Iosi he seemed like he might be like a security guard, then I thought he might work in the Israeli Embassy,” he told me in a café in Buenos Aires’ Barrio Norte.

In those first singles meetings—the first after the AMIA attack—Pérez promised Dulfano a position in the Martin Buber school, a school where he worked security. Shortly thereafter, Dulfano started as a weekend guard.

“When I learned that he was an agent of the Federal Police, I was disappointed, but after reading the book I changed my perspective,” he told me. “Among the community he was shunned. They’ll get mad at me for what I’m saying to you: I think he’s a good guy and I’d like to give him a hug.”

Dulfano took out his phone to show me a Yahoo email address. He asked: “Does he still use this address?”

In The Repentant Spy, Pérez maintains strong memories of his love for his wife, whom he calls Eli, but whose real name is Alicia. Before getting to her he had a quasi-adolescent and unprofessional relationship with another Jewish woman early in his infiltration. “Women were my weak point: which was good because they were an information source, but then they would become a problem,” he wrote.

In one of his Hebrew classes, Pérez met a student, Tamara, who helped to integrate him into Jativa. With that group of 20 young people under the age of 25, he had his first Shabbat and participated in Zionist talks. He started dating Dafne, the daughter of a clothes seller at Rivadavia and Carabobo streets, but he was also secretly seeing Tamara. One weekend he got involved with a Mexican visitor who made the affair public in a meeting where all three were present. He had to leave Jativa.

“Let this be the last time you put your mission at risk for something of that nature,” Pérez remembered his Federal Police handler telling him.

It was by being part of those communities that he met Alicia. He attended a protest over the desecration of graves in a Jewish cemetery in France, supposedly to file an intelligence report. In reality, he had gone to see Alicia. He describes her as having green eyes and reddish-blond curls, a hybrid of hippie and country girl that matched what he imagined kibbutz girls to be like. In an event called Israel Night, in March 1990, he decided to declare his love, and she said yes. By Rosh Hashanah, later that year, he already felt the depth of their union. They agreed that when they had kids they would speak Hebrew at home.

After one year of engagement, they traveled to the province of Entre Rios so she could meet his parents. Pérez’s son, 6 at the time, came out to greet them. His grandmother, Iosi’s mother, made a comment in passing. “Look at his pants,” she said to Iosi. “They’re the same ones you wore for your Communion.”

It was a seismic phrase. Pérez had to tell Alicia the truth: that he worked in intelligence, that he had been ordered to infiltrate, but that he had begun to feel Jewish. Eli cried at what she heard—and over the bombing of Jewish targets in the Gulf War. After a week of talking and long walks, she gave them a second chance. They were married shortly after. “She recognized me for the love of her life, and I for hers,” wrote Pérez.

According to Pérez, the crisis with his wife began in 1997 when his superiors began to suspect him and sent him to work in Parana, Entre Rios. He would go and come back to Buenos Aires every three weeks. Alicia asked him to request a transfer. She told mutual friends that Pérez had been unfaithful. The couple divorced in 2000.

Alicia remarried and had two children. “She gave one of them the name we had chosen for our son, if we had had one. That destroyed me,” Iosi wrote. He recounted how once he asked her if she was in love.

“I’m good,” she said.

“If she had said, ‘I’m in love’ I would have forgotten her forever, but like that I couldn’t. I still can’t,” he wrote 10 years ago. So it remains.

In part because she does not give interviews, Alicia has been able to distance herself from the Pérez case. But Carla Quevedo, the actress who plays Alicia in the Amazon series directed by Daniel Burman and Sebastián Borensztein, does. Wearing jeans and a white T-shirt, she met me in a hipster corner of Nuñez, in the north of Buenos Aires city.

“The only moment of truth in Iosi is her,” Quevedo told me. “They were completely in love. It’s the one truth in the middle of his entire life of fiction.”

Quevedo, who first starred in The Secret in Their Eyes, the second Argentine movie to win an Oscar, lived in the United States for 10 years—she was cast in Show Me a Hero and in other series and movies—and wrote a novel about those years that shares a theme with Iosi: romanticized love. “Iosi has something hyper-local—the story of the attacks—but also something universal. The search for truth, questions of identity—what are we—and a love story,” she explained. “Above all, it’s a story about young love.”

From 1997 until 2008, Pérez worked in Entre Rios, choosing the town of Parana in order to be close to his parents. He would work from 11 at night until 7 in the morning and every day he would take a 600 km bus ride there and back home to the family. One of his bosses asked him to spy on his wife, whom he suspected of having a lover. He did it, took photographs, and this led to a friendship between him and his boss. His night work mostly involved reading papers and files.

When in 2010 Nilda Garré became the security minister for Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, she met several times with Pérez in an attempt to end his ostracism. One of his first confessions to her was surprising. In his years in the Martin Buber school—which shared a wall with Garré’s home—the evacuation plan was to pull down Garré’s wall.

Having served on several related parliamentary committees, Garré considered Pérez’s testimony to be an important part of bringing to light the investigation into the AMIA attacks—which she called a national fraud. But she could never make it happen. In an interview for this article Garré remembered from her encounters with Pérez that she was left with an uncomfortable thought: that Pérez may have been a double agent. That he worked for the Federal Police and that he longed to work for Israel, or had already done so.

With Milei now president, his new Minister of Security Patricia Bullrich, who also held that position under Macri, and a group of her advisers made Pérez lose confidence: The program would require witnesses to have cellphones on them and a series of other controls that he didn’t want to accept. Although history paints Pérez as sheltered by Kirchnerism, he has no sympathy for Peronism nor for the left. Those who have dealt with him all these years peg him as a voter of the centrist Unión Cívica Radical.

Since his exit from the witness protection program Pérez no longer has medical insurance, and has endured noticeable swings in his weight. Those who have seen him since have noted his decline, and have begged him to leave Argentina.

One of his preoccupations is to plow ahead with his lawsuit against Gabriel Levinas, which was stalled for several years but which has recently been reopened by his lawyer Lutzky. The suit claims significant economic damages from his forced isolation and hiding, him not having been able to help his sick father, his sanctioning and termination of his career in the Federal Police (in March 2017, when he was forced to retire), for having his picture in mass media, and damage to his son and his girlfriend.

According to the suit, which I reviewed for this article, Pérez has had panic attacks, palpitations, phobias, he has needed sleeping pills, has lost confidence in himself, has had self-destructive thoughts, paranoia, and a diverse set of symptoms that, as the suit reads, “exceed the possibilities of this writ.” Levinas maintains that the case will go nowhere.

In his clandestine isolation, Pérez has become consumed by guilt, and neither the book nor the television series have mitigated that feeling. He would like to reconnect with the rabbi who began his conversion and the few friends he has left. He maintains a few religious rituals. He was disturbed by the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks and he wondered what security failures had allowed it.

Pérez tries to live with his fears, one of them being that the Federal Police or another state security agency will kill him.

I asked Itzik Horn, the director of the AZO from whom Iosi stole the AMIA blueprints and who now lives in Ashkelon, Israel, “Is it possible for him to be Jewish and continue his conversion after what he did to the community?”

“In truth, whatever he’s feeling, it’s not my problem,” Horn answered. “At any rate his conscience will mark his path.”

Two of Horn’s children were kidnapped by Hamas on Oct. 7. His mission now is to find them.