The following comments from the Jewish Community of Oporto will be published in the next edition of Sephardic Horizons journal
In the latest edition of Sephardic Horizons, Lauren Weiner critically evaluated the 2015 Iberian nationality laws as a well-meaning but flawed attempt to address the historical injustices faced by Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain and Portugal. She believes that while the laws symbolise a gesture of atonement, their implementation has been marred by significant bureaucratic obstacles, inconsistent application, and political controversies.
The author did an excellent and diligent job. However, because the Jewish Community of Oporto was mentioned many times in this article, and because there are a number of inaccuracies and errors regarding the organisation, we would like to contribute clarifications that are useful for the general public and for those who decide to make new critical reviews on the Sephardic law in Portugal. We are available for contact should the author or other researchers so wish.
The Portuguese law
The Portuguese legislation on historical reparation for descendants of Sephardic Jews of 2015 aimed to grant nationality to those who could demonstrate a "tradition of belonging to a Sephardic community of Portuguese origin" through objective requirements such as "family names", "family memories", "languages", "genealogies" and others.
The regulation of the law identified some "Sephardic communities of Portuguese origin", from which it would be possible to identify their traditional Jewish families. It stated that traditional Sephardic families from North Africa and Gibraltar "returned" to Portugal after the Inquisition (i.e. they were of Portuguese origin), which necessarily applied to the traditional Sephardic families of the Ottoman Empire and others whose regions were also listed as an example in that law: "some regions of the Mediterranean (Gibraltar, Morocco, Southern France, Italy, Croatia, Greece, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and Algeria), northern Europe (London, Nantes, Paris, Antwerp, Brussels, Rotterdam and Amsterdam), Brazil, the West Indies and the USA".
The 2015 legislation granted the Jewish communities of Oporto and Lisbon the power to issue an opinion on the origin of the applicants, this opinion not being binding on the Registry Office, which should also investigate the Sephardic origins of the applicants, nor on the government, which in any case had the power to "grant or not grant nationality" taking into account numerous criteria of national interest. Therefore, the widespread idea that the Jewish communities of Oporto and Lisbon granted nationality to applicants from the moment they certified their Sephardic origins is false.
According to the Community's interpretation, which remains unchanged to this day, in the spirit of the law only the "Jews" fit, a fact that has nothing to do with "religion", as it is fanatically insisted on, but with a people, a matrilineal genealogy, a family of families. In this regard, the organization has always asked two central questions. First, if knowledge of the Jewish world and its institutions did not matter, then why did the Portuguese state need the opinion (certification) of the Jewish communities of Oporto and Lisbon and not simply choose a team of genealogists? Second, if non-Jews with genealogical connections to Portugal could obtain Portuguese nationality based on another specific norm of the law for their case, then what was the logic of benefiting from a law that aimed to repair a historical injustice with the Sephardim of Portuguese origin?
The work of the Community
The Jewish Community of Oporto (which in 2013 suggested to the government that an international commission carry out the certification work, because it was then busy rehabilitating its majestic synagogue and opening a kosher hotel) has always thought itself qualified only to work within the Jewish world, the world it knows, the world of Jews (or at least children of Jewish fathers) who belonged to traditional families of "Sephardic communities of Portuguese origin". Even so, no one would be excluded from benefiting from the law, because the Jewish Community of Lisbon was preparing to certify also the mere "descendants" of Jews. And so it was.
The Oporto Community immediately wrote to the Register Office in Lisbon underlining that, even though this entity and the government could disagree with the Community's views in relation to any applicants, “these would not cease to be, in the opinion of the Community, (i) Jews (ii) of Portuguese Sephardic origin”. The Community confirmed what was expressly stated in the law itself: each of the entities involved would do its work freely and independently, with the final decision being up to the government.
Initially, the Oporto Jewish Community wondered what workload would be involved in examining applications for certification and how many possible candidates there would be. Edmond Malka, once deputy minister of justice in the state of New Jersey, wrote in the 1970s, in his book entitled "Portuguese Faithful", that "there are about two million Jews of Portuguese-Spanish origin". The Community considered that this number was not exaggerated. For many reasons, the traditional Sephardic families of numerous communities in North Africa and the former Ottoman Empire were necessarily of Portuguese origin, mixed with Spanish and other origins. Marriages during more than five centuries made this inevitable. We will return to this point in the final part of this article.
On the other hand, regarding family trees, the Community has always been aware of their rarity. In general, there are no family trees in the Jewish world, a people of forced immigrants, except in modern European cities, with political peace, where Jewish communities were founded very late on and from scratch. Although the legislation guaranteed that the families from Morocco and Gibraltar who returned to Portugal in the nineteenth century were of Portuguese origin (the family of the former president of the Republic Jorge Sampaio was always recognized as such), none of these families had a family tree stretching back through the centuries to Portugal, much less one verifiable at each generation. Indeed, no one can show a family tree going back centuries in Morocco or even in Turkey where the great synagogues were burned.
The overwhelming work involving tens of thousands of hours of effort that the Community has carried out in certifying Jews descended from Sephardic communities of Portuguese origin (or rather, also of Portuguese origin) became apparent to the public during the hostage crisis in Gaza. About thirty hostages had Portuguese nationality or links to Portugal (such as Ofer Calderon, mentioned in the critical review). All had been certified by the Community as belonging to Jewish families from Turkey, Greece, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Morocco and other traditional Sephardic communities with origins in the Iberian Peninsula.
There were also Jews from other origins who proved to the Community that their families had Iberian "Sephardic names" and "family memories" of connection to Sephardic communities of Portuguese origin. In the latter case this was done through credible testimonies, such as the authorities recognized by the Chief Rabbinate of Israel and Jewish families of high reputation and independence. It should be noted that these cases of Jews from other origins make up less than 1% of the certificates that the Community has issued over the years. Overwhelmed with requests, as it always has been, the organization has always feared these cases, due to the risk associated with the possibility of error and the slowness of the analysis under the constant pressure of the applicants and their lawyers. This is unlike what happened with families clearly Sephardic from Sepharad, such as the Azoulay family of Algeria, the Toledano family of Tunisia, the Habib of Turkey, and many others, who could be approved immediately, without pressure and without fear of making mistakes.
The Community has done its work in good faith, to the best of its ability, in accordance with its criteria which have been approved by successive governments. The department worked well, as did all the other departments of the organization. One of the best Yom Kippur events in Europe is held in Oporto and the Portuguese film with the most internationally awards ever ("1618") was produced by the Community.
It is to be assumed that the Registry Office and the government also did their job to the best of their ability. If this has not happened, they have only themselves to blame, not the Community. It is absurd to imagine that the Community will ever accept that through Sephardic certification it was actually responsible for granting nationality.
Stains on the reputation of the law
Lauren Weiner's critical review correctly states that the reputation of the Spanish law was damaged by the election of the socialist government in 2018. This is the year in which a "police alert of fraud" and suspicions of corruption appeared. Nothing has happened to date and that no one has been accused of fraud.
Worse than this happened in Portugal, also under the socialist government, which in May 2020 began to weaken the law, an action it justified by linking the law to “passports of convenience”, “money for genealogists and lawyers”, and “unbridled propaganda in Israel”. The spirit of the law was, from the beginning, the "return of a right". The applicants did not need to live in Portugal or speak Portuguese. But in this regard the socialists began to talk about "free transit at airports with a passport worth gold".
At the time of this debate, there was still no talk of Roman Abramovich, who had not yet applied for Portuguese nationality. However, not a word was said by the socialists about any positive effect of the law, including the promotion of Jewish life that was allowing Portugal to return to having a strong Jewish community in cultural and religious terms. The entire debate was presided over by a "Palestinian issue" of the government, which is documented. More information on this point is found in the second part of the free book "The Portuguese Dreyfus Case: A scandal from 1937 heard in the European Court of Human Rights in 2024", available on Amazon.
Lauren Weiner says that the police investigation into the certification process of the Jewish Community of Oporto in 2022 and the arrest of its chief rabbi began with two obscure anonymous letters. One was about who made the law, and the other was about the rabbi's imminent flight to Israel, where he always lived. But there were at least four anonymous complaints, all deadly, all articulated with each other, all serving the interests of political power, which sought to link the leaders of the organization to unspecified frauds and the certification of the multimillionaire Patrick Drahi.
It was precisely the case of this rich Sephardic Jew, clearly of Portuguese origin, and who had been correctly certified by the Jewish Community of Lisbon, that motivated the illegal invasion of the synagogue in Oporto. The police wanted Drahi's documents (which, of course, the Community did not have) so badly that they forgot to take Roman Abramovich's file, about which the political press was shouting everyday.
In 2021, the government and the registry office granted this last billionaire nationality without raising any objections or even asking the Community for any information. The case was treated urgently, in just two months, for reasons of "national interest". And then, the predictable happened. Doing the government a favour, a political newspaper published, in the middle of Shabbat, and without consulting the Community beforehand, that Abramovich had been certified in exchange for donations to the Holocaust Museum in Oporto, which was false. Suddenly, uncritical journalists from 150 countries linked the name of the Community to Vladimir Putin. The show had begun and never ended. The best proof of this is that the President of the Russian Federation is mentioned numerous times in the critical review that we are now commenting on.
The Community has never certified Vladimir Putin's Sephardic origins. It did issue, in good faith, an opinion on the Sephardic origins of Roman Abramovich, whose "family memory" was previously certified by the rabbinical authorities of Chabad Lubavitch in Russia and whose "family names", such as Rosa and Leiva, were of Lithuanian Sephardic origin. The name Abramovich itself appears on lists of Polish Sephardic Jews in 1580 and, in fact, over the years, the Community approved 108 people with that name, which, in itself, was not sufficient, but was combined with other evidence that made it possible to prove the family connection of the applicants to some "Sephardic community of Portuguese origin".
None of this is present in Lauren Weiner's critical review, which has instead resorted to yet another anonymous document and the epithet "oligarch" to characterise a person whose exceptionally wealthy grandfather was robbed of everything, his hotel, boats, and property, before he was murdered in Siberia. What interests the Community is the Jewish world, where it has many friends and partners, such as the Chief Rabbis of Kiev, Odessa and Moscow, all from Chabad Lubavitch, founded by the grandson of Rabbi Baruch Portugali and supported by Roman Abramovich for two decades.
When Vladimir Zelensky asked US President Joe Biden not to sanction the Russian billionaire (whose mother is Ukrainian and who has Lithuanian children, two nationalities to which he is entitled) he demonstrated how complex are the textures and connections of a people of forced immigrants. Jonathan Markovitch, the Chief Rabbi of Kiev, a friend and a partner of the Oporto Jewish Community, is a Jew of Portuguese origin, he and his lovely wife.
The family origins of ex-Soviet Jews have nothing to do with the fact that Russia has become a pariah in the West, and no one has ever wanted to know how many certificates were issued to Russian citizens by other Jewish communities in Portugal and Spain.
Court proceedings
Lauren Weiner states in her critical review that the Community has sued the Portuguese state in a court of the European Union, which is true, but at a much higher level. The European Court of Human Rights and the Brussels Judicial Court are just two of several courts that have been sued. The Community has also sued the state before Portuguese courts, and is asking for compensation of 10 million euros, because not even in an African savannah can one invade a synagogue and arrest a rabbi waving anonymous complaints falsely saying that he certified Patrick Drahi and that the leaders were fleeing with bags of money.
Weiner also mentions an investigation at the hands of the Institute of Registries and Notaries of Portugal and about which no one has ever heard of again. However, the Portuguese Jewish News reported twice that as early as 2022 that Institute informed the Community that it had concluded that the registry procedures carried out regarding the acquisition of nationality by Jews of Sephardic origin, including Roman Abramovich, were "correct".
The government and the political press, which for weeks on end had brandished the existence of this "inquiry", with headlines such as "Abramovich case under investigation", "Report to be published in February", "Abramovich in trouble", etc. never made public the conclusions of the investigation, because this would destroy the game of propaganda that they had so carefully set up to bring about the end of a law benefitting Jews. Meanwhile, the 250 euros fee that the Community received from Roman Abramovich was donated to the Registry Office "to buy umbrellas" and keep sheltered from the conflict.
We live in a soulless society, in which an independent power, even from a spiritual and cultural point of view, does not arouse any respect or mercy, but is destroyed without any chance of appeal. The political press and the Lisbon prosecutor's office also participated in the deadly game at the hands of the Portuguese socialist government.
The miserable work of the press, shrouded in the most blatant journalistic corruption, can be summed up in the 40 deadly news stories of the journalist quoted in the critical review. This is a huge number of news stories produced by the same person, who has not once contacted the Community to check his serious assertions. He cites anonymous sources, denigrating the Community by all means and aligning his work entirely with the wishes of the socialist government.
As for the Lisbon prosecutor's office, it received the anonymous complaints directly from the hands of the government, after the Oporto police had refused to open an investigation because there were no "indictments of crime" but only "generalities". This was confirmed later by the Court of Appeal.
The objective of the police searches in the largest synagogue in the Iberian Peninsula, in the Jewish museum and in other places, including the home of the granddaughter of the "Portuguese Dreyfus" was to steal documents, email boxes and mobile phones, to try to find some impurity, whatever its nature. This is no different from what the Inquisition did. The "investigation" team has already been warned that they will have to return the stolen material and apologize.
Once again, we recommend reading the aforementioned book. In this outrageous story, every means has been used to try to incriminate the Community. Thieves who stole computers and servers, car saboteurs who tried to eliminate a young French Jew, and anonymous, criminally convicted whistleblowers intervened. No serious journalist has investigated this to date, neither in Portugal nor abroad. The Community has promoted an international investigation into everything that happened and will share updates in the future.
The Community has suffered a great deal of damage
Portugal has witnessed a case of state corruption. It seems that the seriousness of existence and the knowledge of history have been lost. What matters is circus and scandal. There was persecution of the Sephardic law, of the right of many Jews to be Portuguese citizens, and of the only Portuguese Jewish community with synagogues, restaurants, a Jewish Museum, a painting gallery, and a Jewish cinema. This community has already attracted one fifth of the country's teenage population to the Holocaust Museum.
Fees of 150 euros, later 500 euros (at the request of the Jewish community of Lisbon) and finally 250 euros, allowed the Community to create a significant structure, a network of solidarity in more than a dozen countries and to produce films about the edicts of expulsion in Portugal and Spain, the abduction of 2000 Spanish Jewish children by the Portuguese king, the genocide in Lisbon, the inquisition in Oporto, and the rescue of the Marranos and the "Portuguese Dreyfus", who was persecuted in 1937, as was his granddaughter in 2022, in sordid cases of anonymous denunciations by the rabble of society that the state took advantage of to destroy the community of the time.
The vast work of the Jewish Community of Oporto, whose dimension has no parallel in any other European Jewish organization, was called "the millions of the nationality law", when what was in fact at stake was the application of revenues in the promotion of religion, culture, history, education, the teaching of the Holocaust and charity. Recently, a Portuguese journalist asked the Community what its assessment of the nationality law was. When the Community replied to him explaining its vast work and growth and saying its assets belong to the World Jewish Agency, he replied that he only wanted to know the numbers. That says it all.
Political, media, police and criminal persecution (in the strict sense, with the effective intervention of convicts and other delinquents) caused suffering in Oporto. The profound contempt that is currently shown to higher culture, the promotion of Jewish life and Jewish success has become evident, as has the lack of honesty of countless non-Jewish and Jewish people and institutions. The mediocrity, the envy, the backbiting, the vanity, the cruelty of trampling on those who are fallen, the desire that the successful be defeated, the iron will to ride on the political wave of the moment, all this happened. It was by gathering this pile of rubbish that "democratic scrutiny" in Portugal was dedicated.
In that year 2022, the Community was only supported by Israeli President Isaac Herzog, the European Jewish Association and the Jewish News Syndicate. Only these people and institutions escaped general mediocrity or the fear of being associated with "Putin", a name that did damage. All those who have hitherto used or uttered the five letters of this name have contributed to the murder of the Community, because the passionate application which it has made of its surplus resources in favour of the Jewish world was based on the belief that in the future it would receive donations from friends all over the world, who have meanwhile abandoned the Community to avoid being associated with the Kremlin.
In the meantime, the Community is independent and free enough not to have to surf the political waves of the moment, just as the State of Israel defends its interests first and foremost, counting on the assistance of the Jewish communities around the world, whether in America or Eurasia. The subject is complex and will not be addressed here.
The right to nationality still exists
The Portuguese Parliament recently approved a law that requires descendants of Sephardic communities of Portuguese origin to live in Portugal for three years. This law is ineffective. It violates European legislation on European citizenship and the prohibition of discrimination.
Since 1981, all descendants of communities of Portuguese origin have the right to apply for nationality, provided they can prove their historical ties to these communities. When in 2013 the parliament approved a provision for descendants of Sephardic communities of Portuguese origin, this provision was in fact unnecessary. Jews were already covered by that previous law.
At the present time, the right of Jews of Sephardic origin to apply for nationality still exists and should be exercised through the articulation of the aforementioned laws, choosing from each of them, in general legal terms, that which constitutes the most favourable treatment for applicants. Any rejection by the registry office should be followed by legal action based on European and international law.
As the descendants of Sephardic communities of Portuguese origin are obviously also descendants of communities of Portuguese origin, they can apply for nationality by proving the historical link, and nothing more, on pain of the Portuguese state being prosecuted and forced to comply with European legislation. The applicant can prove his or her historical link to Portugal (or rather, to any "Sephardic community of Portuguese origin") through family names, family memory, the language that the family practices or once practiced, and other evidence. The law mentions those criteria as examples.
As we wrote before, the applicants do not need to speak Portuguese or live in Portugal. The author of the critical review cites a source that guarantees that “With over 60,000 Israelis holding Portuguese nationality as of 2022, only 569 Israeli citizens reside in Portugal (per the 2022 SEF report)." However, Israelis with Portuguese nationality have no contact with the Foreigners and Borders Service (SEF). Those people who contacted SEF are not Israeli-Portuguese citizens, but foreigners living in Portugal.
Who is entitled to Portuguese nationality? All those who are descended from traditional Sephardic families of Portuguese and Spanish origin, intertwined in the same families, the same surnames, the same destinations in the diaspora and by marriage. In terms of mixing Jewish blood, the impact of marriage is great in each generation. Approximately 200,000 Moroccan Jews immigrated to Israel in the 20th century. The Israeli census of 2019 counted 472,800 Jews born in Morocco or children of Moroccan parents. According to the World Federation of Moroccan Jewry, with marriages between Moroccans and Ashkenazim, Yemenites and others there are already 1 million of Israeli Jews of Moroccan descent.
Prof. Joshua Weitz, from the School of Biology and Physics at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, USA, demonstrated in 2014, through simple genealogical models, that modern Jews, numbering 15 million, "have many ancestors expelled from Spain in 1492" ("Let My People Go (home) to Spain: a Genealogical model of Jewish Identities Since 1492"). In 19 generations, each living person can have more than 1 million ancestors (1,048,574) and Jews have always intermarried and have always crossed borders due to persecution, trade and marriage, except for very rare exceptions.
Finally, we would like to correct another inaccuracy appearing in the critical review that is often repeated. The Jewish Community of Oporto was founded in 1923 by Jews from Eastern Europe and a Portuguese and four years later it dedicated itself to trying to rescue the Marranos. The current president of the Jewish Community of Oporto, the author of this article, is not Sephardic, but Ashkenazi, although he has Sephardic origins on his maternal grandmother's side. He never applied for Portuguese citizenship through the law. Similarly, two colleagues on the board and the deputy rabbi, from traditional Sephardic families in India, Algeria, and Morocco did not apply for citizenship.
On behalf of the board of directors of the Jewish Community of Oporto,
Gabriel Senderowicz
President of the Community
Board member of the European Jewish Association
