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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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Drexel University Professor Stole Signs From Synagogue, Police Say
Illustrative: People pass a cluster of signs outside a pro-Hamas encampment at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. on April 28, 2024. Photo: Max Herman via Reuters Connect
A Drexel University professor allegedly participated in a mass theft of items from a synagogue in a suburb outside Philadelphia, a local NBC affiliate reported on Tuesday.
Mariana Chilton, 56, a professor of health management and policy at Drexel, has been accused of stealing pro-Israel signs from the Main Line Reform Temple in Lower Merion Township, traveling there from her neighborhood of residency, Wynnewood, Pennsylvania. Chilton allegedly drove the getaway car while two other accomplices, Sarah Prickett and Sam Penn — who is from New York — trespassed the synagogue and absconded with the loot.
“We are just taking them because we feel like it is a representative of genocide,” Chilton told law enforcement after being caught in the act, the report stated. She then, after offering to “just put them back,” refused to identify herself and comply with other lawful orders.
Video evidence provided by a local resident placed Chilton and her accomplices at the scene of the crime, and a Main Line Reform Temple official identified the signs recovered from her car as the temple’s property. That was enough for law enforcement to charge her with several offenses, including conspiracy and theft. She is also charged with driving without a license and not registering her vehicle.
Drexel University has not responded to The Algemeiner‘s request for comment for this story.
Experts have told The Algemeiner in the past academic year that while the conduct of anti-Zionist students should be reported on, the role of faculty in fostering and engaging in antisemitic acts should be closely scrutinized. Last semester, anti-Zionist faculty attached themselves to anti-Israel, pro-Hamas demonstrations, sometimes breaking the law by preventing officers from dispersing unauthorized demonstrations and detaining lawbreakers.
At Northeastern University in Boston, professors formed a human barrier around a student encampment to stop its dismantling by officers, and at Columbia University, anti-Zionist faculty at the school, as well its affiliate Barnard College, staged a walkout in support of the demonstrations and demanded the abeyance of disciplinary sanctions against anti-Zionist students — dozens of whom cheered Hamas and threatened more massacres of Jews similar to Oct. 7 — who violated school rules.
Chilton’s case is unlike any other reported in the past year, however. While dozens of professors have been accused of abusing their Jewish students and encouraging their classmates to bully and shame them, none are alleged to have resorted to stealing from a Jewish house of worship to make their point.
Mass participation of faculty in pro-Hamas demonstrations marks an inflection point in American history, Asaf Romirowsky, an expert on the Middle East and executive director of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, told The Algemeiner in April.
Since the 1960s, he explained, far-left “scholar activists” have gradually seized control of the higher education system, tailoring admissions processes and the curricula to foster ideological radicalism and conformity, which students then carry with them into careers in government, law, corporate America, and education. This system, he concluded, must be challenged.
“The cost of trading scholarship for political propagandizing has been a zeal and pride among faculty who esteem and cheer terrorism, a historical development which is quite telling and indicative of the evolution of the Marxist ideology which has been seeping into the academy since the 1960s,” Romirowsky said. “The message is very clear to all of us who are looking on from the outside at this, and institutions have to begin drawing a red line. The protests are not about free speech. They are about supporting terrorism, about calling for a genocide of Jews.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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White House Cites Biden Clash With Netanyahu Over Iran as Proof of President’s Mental Fitness
US President Joe Biden hosts the 2023 Teacher of the Year event at the White House in Washington, US, April 24, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque
Amid growing concerns over US President Joe Biden’s mental fitness, key White House officials are suggesting his foreign policy discussions with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, including a clash over how to respond to Iran’s unprecedented military attack on the Israeli homeland earlier this year, serve as evidence that he is still capable of leading from the Oval Office.
Biden and Netanyahu engaged in a heated back-and-forth in the immediate aftermath of Iran launching a massive missile and drone salvo at Israel in April, according to a new report by the New York Times. The US and other allies helped Israel shoot down nearly every drone and missile. The attack caused only one injury.
However, the Times revealed that while Netanyahu initially wanted to respond to Iran in a forceful way, Biden threatened to withhold US support in the event of a major Israeli retaliatory strike, arguing it would risk sparking a regional conflict in the Middle East.
“Aides present in the Situation Room the night that Iran hurled a barrage of missiles and drones at Israel portrayed a president in commanding form, lecturing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by phone to avoid a retaliatory escalation that would have inflamed the Middle East,” the Times reported. “‘Let me be crystal clear,’ Mr. Biden said. ‘If you launch a big attack on Iran, you’re on your own.’”
“Mr. Netanyahu pushed back hard, citing the need to respond in kind to deter future attacks,” the report continued. “‘You do this,’ Mr. Biden said forcefully, ‘and I’m out.’ Ultimately, the aides noted, Mr. Netanyahu scaled back his response.”
Israel’s military response was small and appeared aimed at minimizing the risk of escalation.
The Times report, headlined “Biden’s Lapses Are Said to Be Increasingly Common and Worrisome,” came on the heels of Biden delivering a widely-panned presidential debate performance last Thursday against former US President Donald Trump. Biden’s performance, which oftentimes appeared incoherent and muddled, set off alarm bells in Democratic circles, sending the president’s allies scrambling to extinguish concerns over his age and mental acuity.
While highlighting rising concerns, the news story also noted instances in which, according to aides, Biden appeared coherent and capable, citing the exchange with Netanyahu and his handling of the Iranian missile attack more broadly as one such example.
However, an anonymous Biden administration official told the Times that they are unsure whether Biden could hold his own against adversarial foreign leaders such as Vladimir Putin of Russia.
On Wednesday, the White House directly attributed quotes to Netanyahu in which the Israeli premier reportedly said he found Biden “very clear and very focused” during his visit to Israel following the Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas. According to a White House spokesperson, Netanyahu also reportedly cited the “more than a dozen phone conversations, extended conversations with President Biden” as evidence of the commander-in-chief’s vitality.
“Some White House officials adamantly rejected the suggestion of a president not up to handling tough foreign counterparts and told the story of the night Iran attacked Israel in April,” the New York Times reported. “Mr. Biden and his top national security officials were in the Situation Room for hours, bracing for the attack, which came around midnight. Biden was updated in real time as the forces he ordered into the region began shooting down Iranian missiles and drones. He peppered leaders with questions throughout the response.”
During its first direct attack on Israeli territory, Iran in April launched roughly 300 missiles and drones at the Jewish state.
Leading up to the attack, Iranian officials had promised revenge for an airstrike on Iran’s consulate in Damascus, Syria that they attributed to Israel. The strike killed seven members of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), a widely designated terrorist organization, including two senior commanders. One of the commanders allegedly helped plan the Hamas terrorist group’s Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel.
Israel has neither confirmed nor denied involvement in the incident.
“After it was over, and almost all of the missiles and drones had been shot down, Mr. Biden called Mr. Netanyahu to persuade him not to escalate. ‘Take the win,’” Mr. Biden told the prime minister, without reading from a script or extensive notes, according to two people in the room. In the end, Mr. Netanyahu opted for a much smaller and proportionate response that effectively ended the hostilities,” the article added.
Days later, Israel responded to the Iranian aggression by launching a modest missile attack on an airbase near Isfahan. The Jewish state sought to show that it could effectively target key strategic locations in Iran while not escalating the conflict any further. Netanyahu insisted on launching a retaliatory attack against Iran, arguing that ignoring the Iranian strikes would incentivize more attacks against the Jewish state.
IRGC Brigadier General Amir Ali Hajizadeh said that Iran is waiting for “the opportunity” to launch a new round of strikes against Israel, Iranian media reported on Tuesday, potentially boosting Netanyahu’s argument that a smaller response would invite further attacks.
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Journalist at US-Based Nonprofit Promoted Stabbing Israelis, Depicted Rescued Hostage as Pig Drinking Blood: Report
Palestinian terrorists ride an Israeli military vehicle that was seized by gunmen who infiltrated areas of southern Israel, in the northern Gaza Strip, Oct. 7, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Ahmed Zakot
A journalist at a US-based nonprofit posted tutorials on how to commit stabbing attacks and depicted a rescued Israeli hostage as a pig drinking blood, according to newly surfaced social media posts.
Eitan Fischberger, a communications analyst and former Israel Defense Forces (IDF) staff sergeant who first broke the story on X/Twitter, alleged that Mahmoud Ajjour, a correspondent for The Palestine Chronicle, posted disturbing images and videos to his Instagram page.
Fischberger posted screenshots and screen recordings of the posts.
According to The Chronicle‘s website, Ajjour is a photojournalist and correspondent for the outlet, which is a US-based 501c3, or nonprofit organization.
One of the posted images depicted Noa Argamani — an Israeli who was kidnapped from the Nova music festival during Hamas’ Oct. 7 terrorist attacks in southern Israel, and then rescued in an IDF special operation last month — as a pig drinking blood from a Coca-Cola bottle.
Here, for example, Ajjour posted a picture of Israeli hostage Noa Argamani, portrayed as a pig drinking the blood of Palestinians.
Noa, as you recall, was freed by Israeli forces in the same rescue operation in which Ajjour’s terrorist colleague was killed pic.twitter.com/oiLCqekxbl
— Eitan Fischberger (@EFischberger) June 30, 2024
In Oct. 2015, Ajjour posted a picture of a masked Palestinian holding up a knife, with the caption, “I declare it a revolution.”
That time — from approximately Sept. 2015 to June 2016 — was referred to as the “knife intifada,” as there was an uptick in Palestinian terrorist attacks, particularly using knives, against Israelis in Jerusalem, along with other parts of Israel and the West Bank.
Ajjour also seems mighty fine endorsing stabbing attacks pic.twitter.com/xi2MnZVddl
— Eitan Fischberger (@EFischberger) June 30, 2024
During that same month, Ajjour also reportedly posted a two-part tutorial on how to carry out stabbings with the caption, “May Allah protect them,” likely referring to those who were engaging in such attacks.
So much, in fact, that he uploaded a two-part instruction video showing off some best practices for stabbing Israelis pic.twitter.com/Z12rVo4Enx
— Eitan Fischberger (@EFischberger) June 30, 2024
Then, in 2023, after the son of a Hamas preacher was killed when a device he was trying to launch at Israel exploded, Ajjour mourned his death on Instagram. “Your father’s legacy is proud of you,” he wrote alongside a picture that included what appeared to be a Hamas flag.
And here, Ajjour mourns the death of Bara’a al-Zard, son of Hamas preacher Wael al-Zard.
Silly Bara’a died in an explosion caused by a device he was trying to launch at Israeli forces near the Gaza security fencehttps://t.co/vZR6IW0shF pic.twitter.com/ipQw55BYd7
— Eitan Fischberger (@EFischberger) June 30, 2024
This is not the first time a journalist from The Palestine Chronicle was alleged to have either supported or partaken in terrorism.
Abdallah Aljamal, who was a correspondent for The Chronicle, allegedly held three Israeli hostages in his home, according to the Israeli government. He was killed during a raid that rescued four hostages, including Argamani. After the allegations came to light, The Chronicle changed Aljamal’s status on its website from a correspondent to a contributor.
The Palestine Chronicle did not respond to a request for comment for this story.
Fichberger wrote that he wants the US House Ways and Means Committee to investigate The Chronicle for what seems to have become a pattern.
“If The Chronicle is let off the hook for employing an actual terrorist hostage-taker, it would prove that the American counter-terror legal apparatus really is irreparably broken,” he wrote.
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