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The new Jews of Porto: How the Portuguese city built a Jewish community from scratch
PORTO, Portugal (JTA) — In an apartment overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, 95-year-old Marilyn Flitterman habitually sits at her piano to play tunes by George Gershwin and Irving Berlin — long ago committed to memory — while looking back at the past 50 years of her life in Porto.
Born in Brooklyn, she moved to the city on Portugal’s northwest coast with her husband and children in 1970, following a work opportunity her husband found as a textile designer. Coming from a Jewish family in a “Jewish town,” she figured she would drop by Porto’s Kadoorie Mekor Haim Synagogue. The quick visit convinced her to give up on synagogue attendance.
“There was nobody there — two or three people,” Flitterman told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Porto, the country’s second-largest city, whose cobblestone streets and twinkling Douro riverbank hum with tourists, was home to about 40 Jews in 2012. They couldn’t scrape together enough cash to hire a rabbi or seal a leak in the historic synagogue’s ceiling.
But over the past decade, a community of roughly 1,000 Jews has materialized in Porto, thanks to a law that since 2015 has allowed the return of people whose ancestors were expelled during the Portuguese Inquisition. Jewish locals organized a campaign of expansive outreach online and in news advertisements around the world, and an entire community of immigrants heeded the call.
Funding reaped from new residents has enabled the building of a rapid succession of institutions and Jewish tourism attractions — including a Jewish Museum opened in 2019, a Holocaust Museum in 2021 and a cemetery in 2023. The Holocaust Museum has drawn over 50,000 visitors a year since it opened, most of them Portuguese schoolchildren, said Michael Rothwell, the British-born director of the city’s Jewish museums.
“We started to reach out with any means at our disposal to the world of Jews, telling them: Look at Sepharad [Hebrew word for the Iberian Peninsula], this is where Sephardic Jews come from, come and see where it all started,” said Rothwell. “And it worked — we started having quite a few visitors, and some decided to live here.”
The community features young Jews and families from across the globe. Gabriel Senderowicz, the president of Porto’s Jewish communal board, arrived from Brazil in 2017.
“We have about 30 nationalities here — people from Israel, Mexico, Brazil, Tunisia, Turkey, France,” he said. “All continents are represented here.”
Flitterman was inspired to return to synagogue when David Garrett, a member of the Jewish board who has led the community’s revitalization, became her upstairs neighbor. Now the oldest member of a young community, Flitterman pulls up to synagogue every week in a convertible she insists on driving herself, notwithstanding her children’s reminders that she is pushing 100. During an event celebrating European Jewish culture in September, she saw 600 people fill Kadoorie’s seats to watch its choir — in a community that 10 years ago was too small to gather a minyan, or prayer quorum of 10 men.
Marilyn Flitterman poses in her apartment with her daughter Dara. (Shira Li Bartov)
By the end of 2022, about 75,000 people were granted Portuguese citizenship through the Sephardic nationality law. But the future of Jewish migration to Portugal may be determined by the country’s next government.
Portugal will hold a snap election on March 10, following Prime Minister Antonio Costa’s resignation amid charges of corruption. The recently-dissolved parliament advanced a bill to end the law for descendants of Sephardic Jews — partially because of a scandal that rocked the local and international Jewish community last year — and the measure is frozen until the new government takes shape. In Spain, a similar law of return that gave 36,000 applicants citizenship ended in 2019.
An international scandal
In March 2022, federal police raided the Kadoorie synagogue and arrested Rabbi Daniel Litvak on suspicion of influence peddling, document forgery and money laundering in the process of awarding Sephardic citizenship.
To apply for naturalization through the law of return, descendants must obtain certificates vouching for their lineage from Jewish community authorities in Porto or Lisbon. Porto’s authorities were accused of flouting the rules and privileging wealthy applicants in exchange for cash.
One man who received Portuguese citizenship after being certified in Porto made a particular splash across global headlines: Roman Abramovich, the Russian-Jewish billionaire alleged to have close ties with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The Kadoorie Mekor Haim Synagogue is the largest Jewish house of worship in the Iberian Peninsula. (Shira Li Bartov)
Although Abramovich was approved by Porto authorities in 2020 and received citizenship the following year, his membership in the European Union spurred controversy only in 2022 — when it became apparent, as Russian troops amassed on Ukraine’s border, that he could live in Europe despite the EU sanctions being imposed on Russian oligarchs.
Judges in Lisbon found no evidence of bribery or fraud in Abramovich’s approval. A SWIFT payment receipt seen by JTA shows that Abramovich paid 250 euros to the Jewish Community of Porto, the standard fee paid by all applicants. Local officials told JTA that Abramovich fulfilled the same criteria as everyone else who received certification in Porto.
Initially, the Portuguese government gave community leaders significant discretion to determine Sephardic ancestry. But Lisbon and Porto interpreted the law differently. In Lisbon, applicants underwent a genealogical study and did not have to identify as Sephardic Jews themselves, so long as they could prove lineage. Porto took a route that made the process faster and easier for Jews who wanted Portuguese nationality: They needed only to show the etymology of a family surname and an attestation from their local rabbi, both of which Abramovich provided.
After the scandal, Portugal radically strengthened its law’s requirements. Applicants must now prove they inherited property from Portugal or have visited the country regularly throughout their lives. The new criteria changed the proposed purpose of the law, originally presented as a form of reparation for descendants who had lost inherited assets and were unable to return.
The unproven allegations left a scar on members of Porto’s Jewish community, many of whom still grimace at the memory. Some view the incident as a smear campaign driven by bone-deep, generational antisemitism going back to the Inquisition. The city’s Jewish authority recently sued the state for 10 million euros in compensation for its reputational harm and “political aggression” against Porto’s Jews.
“We represented everything that the society of Portugal didn’t like,” said Garrett, who has lived in Porto his entire life. “They don’t like Jewish tradition, they don’t like the Shoah museum with all the children there, they don’t like Jewish success. We were nothing, and then we were growing, and we were totally destroyed. We will never forgive this.”
Rafael Galhano de Almeida, an immigration lawyer in Lisbon, said that some Portuguese people have correlated the nationality law with antisemitic conspiracy theories about Jews controlling the world. However, he also noted that some critics who are not antisemitic have raised legitimate questions.
“The community that is issuing the certificate proving you are a descendant of Sephardic Jews is the Jewish community,” said Almeida. “So for some people in Portugal, there is a conflict of interest, because you are issuing the certificate when you are the interested party.”
The law’s reverberations
Porto’s new businesses hold up a mirror to its blossoming Jewish community and surge of Jewish tourism. Recent years have seen the opening of four Jewish restaurants, a kosher hotel and a kosher grocery store.
Esther Boudara and Camelia Totan, who run the popular Iberia Sababa Kosher Restaurant, both have Sephardic roots. Boudara was born in France to parents of Turkish and Tunisian origin, while Totan comes from Morocco.
The partners moved to Porto in 2019, with husbands and children in tow, after Boudara read an article promoting its Jewish community in a French newspaper.
“This article said there are a few families coming from all around the world, they speak English, Portuguese, Hebrew — and the city of Porto is asking new Jewish families to come to settle,” said Boudara. “What city in the world asks something like this?”
Boudara and Totan set out to defy the bland stereotypes of kosher food with a diverse, cross-border Sephardic menu. On any Shabbat evening, Iberia’s tables teem with groups wolfing down Moroccan lamb, Tunisian fish and Israeli salads.
Esther Boudara, left, and Camelia Totan serve a cross-border Sephardic menu at Sababa. (Shira Li Bartov)
Other Jews, like Vivian Groisman, flocked to Porto for its quality of life. Groisman grew up in Brazil and arrived seven years ago with a student visa, then obtained citizenship through the Sephardic nationality law.
“If I get pregnant, I want my kids to walk in the street and go to the park and have a calm life, with doctors and schools nearby,” she said. “In Brazil, it takes an hour or two to go to work — you don’t have this way of life where you can go walking and be somewhere in 10 minutes. It’s so expensive to have a life there.”
However, some Jewish newcomers have felt a chafing response from Portuguese natives, driven sometimes by antisemitism and sometimes by resentment over the country’s economic stratification.
The Sephardic nationality law passed in 2013, while Portugal was gripped by a severe financial crisis. During the same period, the government passed other incentives for foreign investors to infuse money in the country, such as the “golden visa” scheme that offered a Portuguese passport in exchange for a minimum investment of 250,000 euros in the country.
Property investments helped end the debt crisis, but they also fueled a two-tiered system in which wealthy foreigners have bought up entire buildings while locals, whose wages are low, struggle to keep up with soaring rents.
Some Portuguese criticize these paths to citizenship as auctions selling off their nationality to the highest bidders. They point out that many people who were naturalized through the golden visa and the law of return enjoy the benefits of an EU passport without actually living in Portugal, learning its language or integrating into its culture.
But Almeida said that no matter what Sephardic Jewish descendants choose to do, as long as the law survives, simply owning nationality is their right.
“The law was created as a reparation law,” he said. “The goal was not to send people here, it was to give them the possibility of having a citizenship that was the citizenship of their ancestors.”
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The post The new Jews of Porto: How the Portuguese city built a Jewish community from scratch appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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University of California Rejects Ethnic Studies Admissions Requirement in Faculty Assembly Vote
Demonstrators holding a “Stand Up for Internationals” rally on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, in Berkeley, California, US, April 17, 2025. Photo: Carlos Barria via Reuters Connect.
The University of California (UC) Faculty Assembly has rejected a proposal to establish passing ethnic studies in high school as a requirement for admission to its 10 taxpayer-funded schools for undergraduates.
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, the campaign for the measure — defeated overwhelmingly 29-12 with 12 abstaining — was spearheaded by Christine Hong, chair of the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies department at UC Santa Cruz. Hong believes that Zionism is a “colonial racial project” and that Israel is a “settler colonial state.” Moreover, she holds that anti-Zionism is “part and parcel” of the ethnic studies discipline.
Ethnic studies activists like Hong throughout the University of California system coveted the admissions requirement because it would have facilitated their aligning ethnic studies curricula at the K-12 level with “liberated ethnic studies,” an extreme revolutionary project that was rejected by California Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2023. Had the proposal been successful, school officials of both public and private schools would have been forced to comply with their standard of what constitutes ethnic studies to qualify their students for admission to UC.
Being indoctrinated into anti-Zionism and “hating Jews” would essentially have become a prerequisite for becoming a UC student had the Faculty Assembly approved the measure, Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, executive director of antisemitism watchdog AMCHA Initiative, told The Algemeiner on Friday. AMCHA Initiative first raised the alarm about the proposal in 2023, calling it “a deeply frightening prospect.”
“Ethnic studies never intended to be like any other discipline or subject. It was always intended to be a political project for fomenting revolution according to the dictates of however the activists behind the subject defined it,” Rossman-Benjamin explained. “And anti-Zionism has been at the core of the field, and this became especially clear after Oct. 7. Most of the anti-Zionist mania on campuses that day — the support for the encampments, the Faculty for Justice in Palestine chapters — it was a project of Ethnic Studies. At UC Santa Cruz, 60 percent of Faculty for Justice in Palestine members were pulled from the ethnic studies department.”
Founded in the 1960s to provide an alternative curriculum for beneficiaries of racial preferences whose retention rates lagged behind traditional college students, ethnic studies is based on anti-capitalist, anti-liberal, and anti-Western ideologies found in the writings of, among others, Franz Fanon, Huey Newton, Simone de Beauvoir, and Karl Marx. Its principal ideological target in the 20th century was the remains of European imperialism in Africa and the Middle East, but overtime it identified new “systems of oppression,” most notably the emergent superpower that was the US after World War II and the nation that became its closest ally in the Middle East: Israel.
UC Santa Cruz’s Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES) department is a case study in how the ideology leads inexorably to anti-Zionist antisemitism, AMCHA Initiative argued in a 2024 study.
Following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, CRES issued a statement rationalizing the terrorist group’s atrocities as political resistance. Additionally, the department days later participated in a “Call for a Global General Strike,” refusing to work because Israel mounted a military response to Hamas’s atrocities — an action CRES called “Israel’s genocidal attack on Gaza.” Later, the department held an event titled, “The Genocide in Gaza in our [sic] Classrooms: A Teaching Palestine Workshop,” in which professors and teaching assistants were trained in how to persuade students that Zionism is a racist and genocidal endeavor.
Imposing such noxious views on all California students would have been catastrophic, Rossman-Benjamin told The Algemeiner.
“The goal of admissions requirements is to make sure that students are adequately prepared for college,” she noted. “Their goal was to use their power to force students to take the kind of Critical Ethnic Studies that is taught at the university, with the goal of revolutionizing society. The idea should have been dead on arrival, being rejected on the grounds that there is no evidence that it is a worthwhile subject that should be required for admission to the University of California.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post University of California Rejects Ethnic Studies Admissions Requirement in Faculty Assembly Vote first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Israeli FM Praises Paraguay Decision to Label Iran’s IRGC, Proxies Hamas and Hezbollah as Terrorist Organizations
Paraguayan President Santiago Peña praying at the Western Wall in Jerusalem on Dec. 12, 2024. Photo: The Western Wall Heritage Foundation
Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar praised Paraguay’s decision to designate Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a terrorist organization, and to broaden the country’s previous designation to include all factions of Hamas and Hezbollah.
The top Israeli diplomat congratulated the South American country and described President Santiago Peña’s decision as a “landmark move” in addressing security challenges and fostering international peace.
“Iran is the world’s leading exporter of terrorism and extremism, and together with its terror proxies, it threatens regional stability and global peace,” Sa’ar wrote in a post on X. “More countries should follow suit and join the fight against Iranian aggression and terrorism.”
I commend Paraguay and @SantiPenap for the landmark decision to designate the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, Hamas, and Hezbollah as terrorist organizations.
Iran is the world’s leading exporter of terrorism and extremism, and together with its terror proxies, it threatens… https://t.co/OzWACbWcno— Gideon Sa’ar | גדעון סער (@gidonsaar) April 24, 2025
On Thursday, Peña issued an executive order designating the IRGC as a terrorist organization “for its systematic violations of peace, human rights, and the security of the international community.”
The executive order also expanded Paraguay’s 2019 proscription of the armed wings of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas, the al-Qassam Brigades, and Hezbollah, the Iran-backed terrorist group in Lebanon, to encompass the entirety of both organizations, including their political wings.
“With this decision, Paraguay reaffirms its unwavering commitment to peace, international security, and the unconditional respect for human rights, solidifying its position within the international community as a country firmly opposed to all forms of terrorism and strengthening its relations with allied nations in this fight,” Peña wrote in a post on X, emphasizing the country’s strategic relationship with the United States and Israel.
Iran is the chief international backer of Hamas and Hezbollah, providing the Islamist terror groups with weapons, funding, and training. According to media reports based on documents seized by the Israeli military in Gaza last year, Iran had been informed about Hamas’s plan to launch the Oct. 7 attack months in advance.
Last year, Peña reopened Paraguay’s embassy in Jerusalem, making it the sixth nation — after the US, Guatemala, Honduras, Kosovo, and Papua New Guinea — to establish its embassy in the Israeli capital. During the same visit, he condemned the Hamas-led massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, calling the perpetrators “criminals” in a speech at the Knesset, the Israeli parliament.
The Trump administration also praised Paraguay’s decision to officially label the IRGC as a terrorist organization, describing it as a major blow to Iran’s terror network in the Western Hemisphere.
“Iran remains the leading state sponsor of terrorism in the world and has financed and directed numerous terrorist attacks and activities globally, through its IRGC-Qods Force and proxies such as Hezbollah and Hamas,” US State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce said in a statement.
The US official said Paraguay’s action will help disrupt Iran’s ability to finance terrorism and operate in Latin America — particularly in the Tri-Border Area, where Paraguay borders Argentina and Brazil, a region long regarded as a financial hub for Hezbollah-linked operatives.
“The important steps Paraguay has taken will help cut off the ability of the Iranian regime and its proxies to plot terrorist attacks and raise money for its malignant and destabilizing activity,” the statement read.
“The United States will continue to work with partners such as Paraguay to confront global security threats,” Bruce added. “We call on all countries to hold the Iranian regime accountable and prevent its operatives, recruiters, financiers, and proxies from operating in their territories.”
During his first administration, Trump designated the IRGC as a foreign terrorist organization (FTO), citing the Iranian regime’s use of the IRGC to “engage in terrorist activities since its inception 40 years ago.”
At the time, Trump said this designation “recognizes the reality that Iran is not only a state sponsor of terrorism, but that the IRGC actively participates in, finances, and promotes terrorism as a tool of statecraft.”
“The IRGC is the Iranian government’s primary means of directing and implementing its global terrorist campaign,” he continued.
The post Israeli FM Praises Paraguay Decision to Label Iran’s IRGC, Proxies Hamas and Hezbollah as Terrorist Organizations first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Yale’s Silence Is Allowing Blatant Campus Antisemitism — and Betraying the Promise of ‘Never Again’
Yale University students at the corner of Grove and College Streets in New Haven, Connecticut, U.S., April 22, 2024. Photo: Melanie Stengel via Reuters Connect.
As darkness fell over Yale University on Wednesday evening, Jewish students faced intimidation that echoed history’s darkest chapters. The following day, as the sun rose on Holocaust Remembrance Day, the world solemnly reflected on the devastating consequences of unchecked hatred.
Yet, disturbingly, at Yale, the shadows of that same hatred linger once again.
For several nights now, radical anti-Israel activists, primarily organized by “Yalies for Palestine,” an anti-Israel hate group, have targeted Jewish students at Yale — in many cases, based solely on their outwardly Jewish appearance.
On Wednesday, protestors blocked walkways, physically intimidated Jewish students, and hurled bottles and sprayed liquids at them — all while campus police stood by and did nothing.
One Jewish student described her chilling encounter with the protesters the night before, on Tuesday: “When I tried to get through, they blocked me, ignored my requests to pass, and handed out masks to those obstructing me. Yale security told me they couldn’t help.”
The immediate trigger for this harassment is the invitation extended by Shabtai, a Yale Jewish society, to Itamar Ben-Gvir, an Israeli government minister. Whether one supports or opposes Ben-Gvir’s politics is beside the point. Notably, Naftali Bennett, a former Israeli prime minister, was also protested and disrupted during a separate campus event in February, underscoring a broader trend of hostility toward Israeli speakers regardless of their political affiliation.
These events signal more than isolated protests; they constitute a redux of hatred that historically escalates when met with institutional silence or indifference.
Yale’s administration, under President Maurie McInnis and Dean Pericles Lewis, has failed to adequately respond. Though Yale revoked official recognition from Yalies for Palestine, its tepid actions have not halted the dangerous slide toward overt hostility. The silence — from both the university and the Slifka Center, Yale’s center for Jewish life — is deafening.
This isn’t the first troubling instance at Yale. A year ago, similar demonstrators disrupted campus life with vitriolic anti-Israel rhetoric, silencing dialogue and fostering an atmosphere hostile to Jewish students.
Earlier this year, CAMERA on Campus documented Yale’s Slifka Center pressuring students to erase evidence of anti-Jewish harassment during a pro-Israel event, effectively whitewashing antisemitism and emboldening extremists.
As CAMERA’s Ricki Hollander has powerfully documented, the rhetoric of anti-Zionism today often revives the antisemitic patterns of the past, particularly those propagated by the Nazi regime in the 1930s. These tactics, she explains, echo Nazi-era propaganda that portrayed Jews as subhuman, sinister, and uniquely malevolent — a narrative used to justify marginalization and, ultimately, genocide.
These dynamics — scapegoating, dehumanizing, and ostracizing Jews under the guise of “anti-Zionism” — are not relics of history. They are alive and active across elite American campuses. And now, unmistakably, they have taken root at Yale.
McInnis must break the silence and condemn the open harassment and assault of Jewish students. She must also hold the perpetrators of the heinous actions and those responsible for the safety of students accountable for their inaction.
This week has revealed a grave failure of moral and institutional duty on many fronts. When law enforcement stands by as Jewish students face intimidation and assault, it sends a chilling message: their safety matters less.
We must demand a full investigation and real accountability. Condemnations of antisemitism are not enough. Policies must be changed to ensure Jewish students and organizations can freely exercise their right to free expression without being subject to harassment and assault. Anything less would betray Yale’s stated values — and the promise of “never again.”
Douglas Sandoval is the Managing Director for CAMERA on Campus.
The post Yale’s Silence Is Allowing Blatant Campus Antisemitism — and Betraying the Promise of ‘Never Again’ first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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