In recent days, the Jewish Community of Oporto has received angry messages from Portuguese individuals who order Jews to emigrate to Israel, a state that, they say, is under a proto-fascist regime and oppressor of Palestinians. The Community is also being very badly treated and accused of having sold Portuguese nationality in exchange for money. Some leading newspapers and the police are invoked as sources of this information.
How does a Jew who has chosen a country to live in feel when he receives messages telling him to emigrate to Israel? "My paternal family fled Bessarabia due to the Chisinau pogrom and my maternal family fled Poland in 1939 at the sound of Nazi bombs. Both fled under the spit of the surrounding population. For me this is nothing new", said Gabriel Senderowicz, the President of the Oporto Jewish Community.
On February 28, the Jewish Community of Oporto regretted the presence in Portugal of Roger Waters and invited him to visit the City's Holocaust Museum. "The persecution of Jews over millennia, based on ideas, religion, culture, race, money and success, has been converted in the modern period to the despicable hatred of the State of Israel. Waters knows that he has a big influence on his fans and that his ideas about Israel can arm crowds that will fire shots tomorrow", stated the Community. "The silence in the West regarding BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions), which advocates the economic, political, academic and cultural isolation of the State of Israel, goes hand in hand with Soviet antisemitism dedicated to destroying all truly relevant Jewish realities in the Diaspora", it added.
Senderowicz points out that what is most notorious in the aggressive messages that the community is receiving is that “they are based not only on the passionate defence of BDS, but also on "Operação Porta Aberta" which today is already known to be a fiasco, a political operation, ordered by certain Lisbon elites who used anonymous denunciations of convicts to destroy Portugal's only strong community, the law of the Sephardim and provoke the flight of the richest Jews."
However, the President of the Jewish community in Oporto thinks "there is always a high risk when you start an action of world importance based on condemned people and commissioned news. A Yiddish proverb says that if you are among the rubbish, you will never get it out of your shoes. That's what happened in Portugal. The authorities, certainly made up of a majority of honourable people, were held hostage to, almost accomplices of countless delinquent adventures. There were several crimes committed to incriminate the Jewish community of Oporto and create and maintain a false thesis. There were robberies, attempted murders, slanderous accusations and others. All of this is closely connected with the persecution against us. These crimes will be investigated internationally and we have already contacted various bodies for this purpose, and not only the European Union."
Asked if the Community is afraid of the powers that persecute it, Gabriel Senderowicz said that "there are hidden powers that have already proven that they are willing to do anything, but they have already lost a lot too, and will lose more and more. They have already shamed Portugal before the world.There is relevant information that we keep for our defence. Right now, the small team that was openly part of the conspiracy is already under the eyes of many people. But one thing is the team of fools, another is to find out those responsible. The blame will not all go to the little ones, the vain, the instruments."
With regard to the police investigation, that has been aimed exclusively at the Oporto community for the last year, Gabriel Senderowicz recalls that "there were numerous searches of the Jewish community in Oporto due to the certification of two benefactors of the Jewish people who, after all, had been certified by the Lisbon community and one other community and due also to alleged dangerous connections between parliament, lawyers and registry offices, connections that in reality only existed in the Lisbon community, and in fact none of that was illegal. They also found that the Lisbon community certified more Eastern European Jews than the Oporto community, and that the value of the emoluments received was higher than in Oporto. So the police authorities were left with a problem.”
Which problem?
“The Lisbon community was valuable as a source of legitimacy for what they were doing. There were no persecution orders for that community, and indeed nothing would justify such persecution. So the process was definitely poisoned. It was definitely a Soviet process equal to those that destroyed hundreds of Soviet Jewish communities", the President concluded.
