ABSTRACT
The event in question took place on the night of December 6, 1982, at the building owned by the Federacao Israelita do Rio Grande do Sul. Newspaper articles, pamphlets and posters charging Jews with the murder of helpless women and children were brought out and distributed for all present to examine. They were examples of what were said by several of those present to be an intensive propaganda campaign that had originated in Sao Paulo, Brazil’s industrial center and most populous city, and had spread throughout the country. At the time the reported events in Lebanon took place there were an estimated ten to fifteen thousand Jews living in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, the vast majority in the capital city of Porto Alegre. The first handful of Jewish colonists in the Rio Grande do Sul were Ashkenazic, members of the early nineteenth-century immigrant population from Germany.
