A menorah was displayed today in the garden of the great synagogue Kadoorie Mekor Haim, remembering the day when the great building was illegally invaded by Lisbon authorities waving anonymous letters. It seems like a long time ago, but for the Jews it is as if it were yesterday. When the synagogue in Porto was invaded by the police in an operation pompously called "Open Door", on March 11, 2022, the Portuguese State became the only one in the world to invade a large synagogue after World War II.

On that day, what most shocked the community was not the non-existent "indictments" against Mr. Patrick Drahi and Mr. Abel Benjamin Rocha da Leiva Leja Rosa Abramovich or against the traditional families of Sephardic North Africa and the former Ottoman Empire, as thirty Hamas victims later demonstrated.

The shock came mainly from the fact that the Portuguese State had demonstrated that the principle of separation of powers exists in laws, but is a sham in real life. It is now documented that it was the government that ordered the opening of a criminal investigation against the community and, even worse, with the argument of being alarmed by the content of fake news that the government itself had planted in a newspaper.

One might suppose that the courts would turn away from this game and punish those responsible. The assumption was not correct. National legislation does not define the word "indictments" (indícios - Portuguese word) and therefore, in practice, the courts tend to state that any piece of news or anonymous letter can be interpreted by law enforcement officials at their discretion. Here's a total aberration in light of the idea of Justice.

Everyone knew that a religious and cultural community lives on donations and that a stain on its good name can destroy the future of the institution. For Jews, the case repeated an ancient state pattern and it is not necessary to go back to the times of expulsion and the Inquisition. In the "Portuguese Dreyfus case", which the same community experienced in the 1930s, a state attack was carried out with the same techniques observed in 2022. The "indictments" also were anonymous letters, and the press called the leader of the community "a mere pantheist" and the other members were called "Bolsheviks".

How easy it is to destroy a Jewish community and how history always repeats itself in the smallest details!

It wasn't just the synagogue that was raided by the police in March 2022. The vice president's house suffered the same unfortunate fate, prompting her to write a letter to future generations: "It's important to highlight the raid on my house and connect it to similar situations that occurred many years ago at my grandfather's residence. My mother always feared that this could happen to us again. And it did. Even today it's hard to believe that this was possible. The police rushed into the building at 8 am. We were sleeping. They rang my doorbell intensely and caused panic. They entered and started rummaging through everything, with great aggression, rudeness and total lack of education. My husband was threatened. They wanted to find suitcases of money. What a deformed mentality! Who do they really think they are? All of that caused a lot of fear. It was frightening and traumatizing."

Portugal is not only a country with decades of open migration and that it has extended the full voting franchise to migrants, allowing political parties to import their own voters and redistribute the resources of the existing populace. The height of ridiculousness occurred in Porto, as the "Open Door Operation" to block illegal immigration was aimed at the Jewish community.

The generation that lived through the unbelievable invasion of the Kadoorie Mekor Haim synagogue will die one day, both the guilty and those targeted by them. However, it is likely that a century or two from now, on March 11 of each year, an imposing Menorah will continue to be displayed in front of the Kadoorie Mekor Haim synagogue.