By Gabriela Cantergi
At the heart of the Jewish community of Oporto, a native of Brooklyn is affectionately called “the boss”. At 95, Marilyn Flitterman regularly attends the central synagogue, plays the piano in a jazz group and drives her convertible every day. She is an inspiration to a community that lay dormant for almost a century but one that, in little over a decade, has undergone a regeneration in religious, cultural, educational and philanthropic terms. Marilyn Flitterman recounts what she saw when she arrived in Oporto in 1970: “Instead of a million Jews, there was my family, three or four other families, that was all”.
The seat of the Jewish community of Oporto, one of Europe’s most majestic synagogues named Kadoorie Mekor Haim, is renowned today for the Yom Kippur it celebrates each year, with nearly a thousand people shouting as one. Members from thirty nations and many young people enliven this wonderful atmosphere. A Jewish visitor who has been to over fifty-five countries, wrote the following to the Community: “I wrote to several friends and family members afterwards to tell them about how deeply moved I was emotionally. I don’t think I’ve ever heard such passionate praying and singing before in a synagogue. It wasn’t just the power of the voices praying in unison that moved me so deeply, it was also the symbolism of so many Jews gathering together in a synagogue in a country that was heavily impacted by the Inquisition.”
What stands out most about this community is the success of its work in promoting culture and knowledge of Jewish history. The “European Days of Jewish Culture”, celebrated for the last twenty years on the first Sunday of September of each year, acquired even greater visibility from the moment the Jewish Community of Oporto decided to celebrate that day, showing a full Jewish life: synagogues, a Holocaust museum, a Jewish museum, cinema, historical films, art galleries, kosher restaurants, a liturgical choir, conferences, book launches and much more besides.
It is unusual for a Jewish community to supervise a Holocaust museum, furthermore one that in only three years has welcomed 150 thousand adolescents, in a country where these number a mere million. Portugal was neutral during the Second World War and is better known for having expelled the Jews and for the Inquisition, which was in force between 1536 and 1821. The history of humanity has never known such an extended persecution for such an innocent cause.
The community has dedicated a Jewish museum to remember inquisitorial times, as well as a documentary film entitled “1618”, whose rights have been sold to airline companies in Arab and Muslim countries and to Samuel Goldwyn Films in the US. The community is neverthlees dissatisfied. The distribution monopoly in the film industry means that it is not possible for everyone to have easy access to this film. And the aim of the community is to promote Jewish history in all its dimensions.
The latest film documentary by the community premiered in April of this year – “1506 – The Lisbon Genocide”. It is free, available on YouTube and Vimeo in English, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Hebrew. The last subtitle of this cinematographic work says that the massacre “is not mentioned in school curricula and has been forgotten”. In fact, few people today know that the Portuguese capital was the setting for one of the greatest genocide operations in Europe against the Jews, prior to the Holocaust. Around four thousand people of all ages were killed and burnt at the stake, accompanied by evil overtones.
Michael Rothwell, the grandson of German Jews murdered at Auschwitz, is the director of the both museums of the community. His grandparents’ names are written at the “memorial room displaying the names of thousands of victims”. Speaking about a memorial outside the museum inscribed with the names of almost a thousand people persecuted by the Inquisition in Oporto, the director says, “The youngest was ten, the oldest 110, and many Espinosas have their names on this memorial. A few years later, Baruch Espinosa was born in Amsterdam”.
The community has protocols with schools all over the country, the museums charge no entrance fee and very often we pay for the transport of school children, who would otherwise not be able to afford the trip. The museums of the Jewish community of Oporto play an important national role, as does its art gallery, the largest Jewish library of the Iberian Peninsula and other cultural facilities. The historical films, on the other hand, aim to reach international audiences.
The inauguration of the Jewish cemetery of Oporto, in 2023, was an event of immense symbolism. The green space, including what resembles a Mount of Olives, is called Campo da Igualdade Isaac Aboab, or Isaac Aboab Field of Equality. The name refers to the greatest Jewish authority in the world when the Jews were expelled from Spain. The king at the time, D. João II, decided to turn a profit on Portugal’s hospitality and demanded that each person who arrived should pay the kingdom the sum of eight cruzados, under penalty of being enslaved. Many were unable to pay.
In 1493, the king ordered 2000 Jewish children under the age of eight to be kidnapped and sent them with hardened criminals to the African islands of São Tomé and Príncipe, 7500 km from Lisbon. Now the Jewish community of Oporto is producing the documentary film “The 2000 Exiled Jewish Children” that will premiere in 2024.
Recently the community published the book “Two Millennia of the Jewish Community of Oporto, Chronology 1923-2023” that explains the history of a millenary community that was expelled in the late 15th century and, following centuries of Inquisition, was officially re-founded in 1923. The central synagogue came about due to donations from the worldwide Sephardic community and the efforts of a Portuguese army captain – Barros Basto – who was expelled from the army in 1937 for having circumcised some of his students, an act considered immoral by the military tribunal. Basto is better known as the “Portuguese Dreyfus”, given the similarities between his case and that of the French captain Albert Dreyfus, his contemporary.
The Jewish community of the time, all of it Ashkenazi and numbering some forty people, considered the persecution of their leader as a sign that these were dangerous times. The community almost went underground. In the following decades, the great synagogue experienced virtually no activities and existed in silence. This sequence of events gave rise to a film based on true events, “Sefarad“, which the community produced a few years ago and which is available on YouTube.
The synagogue was almost a ghost building at the start of 2012, when the few community members restored this huge building and convinced a neighbouring hotel to open a kosher restaurant to receive Jewish tourists. The hotel agreed to pay for a rabbi from Israel to organise this work and, all of a sudden, the community acquired a hotel, an establishment serving Jewish food, Jewish tourists and a religious leader. At the same time, the community asked a local university to provide dental medicine courses for young French students. Today, the community has 300 young students from France and has created a second synagogue for them, and also arranged with Chabad Lubavitch for a Sephardic couple of this organisation to come to Portugal and look after these young people.
Moreover, B’nai B’rith Portugal, one of the branches of the Jewish community of Oporto includes members from all Portugal and all continents. It not only defends human rights in general, but also the often forgotten Jewish human rights. Its work is carried out in conjunction with the International Observatory of Human Rights based in Portugal. Recently, both organisations paid tribute to Shimon Peres and Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson, as “references for good for humanity”, and published a book on human rights written by young Jews of 40 countries.
It could be assumed that the Portuguese state would be proud of the development of its Jewish community, taking into account that Europe has a plan to promote Jewish life. In 2022, the justice minister (Lisbon’s most renowned prosecutor) sent anonymous denunciations which she claimed to have received, to her colleagues in the prosecutor’s office. That was all it took. The synagogue was ilegally invaded by police from Lisbon.
Nothing came of the fact that six months later the court considered that the police operation had been “based on nothing”. The damage was irreversible and the community had been slandered in 150 countries and especially in Portugal. Tens of thousands of hate messages and discriminatory writings were produced, lists of businessmen of the community appeared in a leftist newspaper, graffiti was sprayed on the synagogue and the kosher restaurants, there were bomb threats at the central temple and the Holocaust Museum, and demonstrations against the “Zionist landlords of Oporto”, “no bombs, no evictions”, “no Haifa, no Boavista” (the location of the central synagogue), and so on.
On behalf of the community, one of the most reputable of Israeli lawyers, Dr. Haim Katz, addressed a complaint to the European Court of Human Rights, claiming that “The assumption, legally and factually based on nothing, that corruption surely exists when a group of Jews prosper, is very much based on and anchored in old antisemitic libels which historically plagued Portugal.” The lawyer demands reasonable reparations for the vast damages caused.
Ten years ago, when he was asked why antisemitism was not rampant in Portugal, Samuel Yanovsky, an old member of the Jewish community of Oporto, simply replied: “Because there are not enough Jews.” Yanovsky came from a Belarusian family that had fled the neighbouring pogroms and always remembered the day he attended the inauguration of the Kadoorie Mekor Haim synagogue in 1938, when throughout Europe synagogues were closing their doors. From the height of his 90 years of age, he believed that “the community should invest in culture, history and Chabad, because they have many children and will guarantee our continuity as an individual people”.
Chabad, based in New York, is an organisation with which the Jewish community of Oporto cooperates on many levels, in fourteen countries, including Australia, India, South Africa, China and Ukraine. For years, Shabbat meals have been served in many different points of the globe. Mikvaot, synagogues and cemeteries were built. It is no wonder that the Jewish community of Oporto was the main sponsor of the largest Chabad Centre in Europe, based in Cascais, near Lisbon, while at the same time it strengthens its incredible role in promoting Jewish culture in Portugal.µ
Gabriela Cantergi is a journalist and President, B’nai B’rith Portugal