A decade and a half ago, Jewish life in Portugal was extremely small and invisible. It was almost a joke to watch the so-called "Jewish reality" in a country that was once home to 1/5 of the world's Jewish population. Finding a cohesive, permanent minyan in a synagogue was a hard task, even if the account was limited to ten people.

A decade and a half ago, Jewish life in Porto was in ruins—without Jews, without a minyan, without friends, and without culture. The project of the "Rothschilds" of France and Hong Kong seemed to have definitively failed.

A board meeting took place on 13 Sivan 5772 before sunset. Everything has turned around. Today, the central Synagogue and the Study Centre are both active places of Jewish life. Chabad Lubavitch, whose marvelous headquarters in Cascais had the support of the Porto Community oversees the two temples of the second largest Portuguese city and a new cemetery.

Today, the Community, as an organization, is the World Leader in promoting Jewish culture. The current center-right government, fed up with socialism, has already officially recognized the organization's manifest cultural interest. The Holocaust museum welcomes 50,000 teenagers each year, and the Community promotes Jewish culture through its museums, painting gallery, films on Jewish history, liturgical choir, the Rosh Pinah Library with about ten thousand books, and so on.

As outlined in 13 Sivan 5772, the Porto Jewish Community's aim is to honor its ancestors, rather than in having many friends, that would be a bad sign. Jewish history does not know many moments of cooperation between Jews and Portuguese governments. It is better known for persecutions.

A century ago, the Portuguese Dreyfus was ruined by the state and its press. Four centuries ago, the properties and businesses of the forced "New Christians" were confiscated. Five centuries ago, the Jewish quarter of Olival was stolen from the Jews and called "Vitória" over the Jews.

Today, the modern and increasingly prosperous Jewish Community of Porto is a fact, not a question of opinion. All Community assets belong to the Jewish Agency for Israel. The woke system does not like it. What to do? Confronting Israel is even worse. The Israeli ambassador just called the media power as an "extreme left party".

The woke system would prefer dead Jews. Yet, it's not worth shouting about. There is nothing to do to combat the current Jewish life. Dealing politely with the Community may be the best solution. Historical and economic research strongly indicates that nations welcoming and integrating Jewish populations have consistently achieved superior long-term socioeconomic results compared to those that engaged in persecution.

Maybe the nation's elites need a kind of 13 Sivan of 5787, a reality check, to take a new direction and face the difficult decades to come. The treatment of Jewish minorities is a historical bellwether for a nation's institutional health, human capital preservation, and financial development.

A handful of Hong Kong Jews would be enough to resolve the eternal issue of exploring the immense Portuguese continental shelf, once conquered through Jewish science.