There are European Jewish communities that maintain galleries dedicated to recalling their history, usually through artifacts, textiles and contemporary art. For instance, the Jewish Museum of Frankfurt manages a "Fine Arts" collection of roughly 11,000 drawings and prints, specifically focusing on local Jewish artists and "art in exile". The Galicia Jewish Museum in Krakow hosts temporary exhibitions of paintings and contemporary art, such as the works of Austrian-Jewish artist Soshana. The Jewish Museum in Prague holds one of Europe’s largest visual art collections, with over 18,000 objects, including paintings, drawings, and prints spanning from the 18th century to today. The Jewish Museum of Venice is famous for its silver and textiles, while the Melori&Rosenberg Art Gallery, located in the Ghetto, was the first contemporary “art gallery” in that historical quarter.

The Jewish Community of Porto is the only one that owns and manages a painting gallery displaying works about its entire millennial history. The gallery has two dozen large paintings (1.5m-1.5m) on the history of the Jews in Portugal from their arrival in the territory to the present day. Under the guidance of the Center for Historical Research of the Jewish Community of Porto and the institution's painter, the Venezuelan Flor Mizrahi, the gallery was produced by painters Jorge Marinho, Analice Campos, Helen Doq, Natália Procopovich Bagur and Adélia Santos Costa, who used acrylic on canvas, oil on canvas and mixed systems as techniques.

The painting gallery in Porto is part of a wider cultural initiative that includes the Jewish Museum and the Holocaust Museum, creating a comprehensive educational, artistic, and historical hub in Porto. They portray Jewish history in the city from the arrival of the first Jews to the present day, passing through periods of decline and ruin, of life and death. They show that the harvest years are also the years of the rats.

The paintings are exhibited in chronological order.

1. The role of the Jews in the founding of the kingdom and their friendship with the monarchs.

2. A market of the time, where Jews were prominent merchants.

3. Religious Jews rule the community spiritually.

4. The community prayed next to the walls of Porto, facing Jerusalem.

5. The role of the Jews in the development of the kingdom into a world power.

6. Beit Midrash - dozens of men study the Torah.

7. A ship full of Jews victimized by the edict of expulsion departs from Portugal in the fifteenth century.

8. The forced baptism of adult Jews.

9. The genocide of Lisbon.

10. The decadence of Portugal after the anti-Jewish persecution.

11. An auto-da-fé of the Inquisition in Porto.

12. A map showing the fates of the Portuguese Jewish diaspora.

13. An Ashkenazi wedding in Porto at the beginning of the twentieth century.

14. The exterior image of the Kadoorie Mekor Haim synagogue in 1938.

15. The community welcomes refugees from the Holocaust in 1940.

16. A nun prays the Kaddish for a Jew who died in 1982.

17. The President of the Portuguese Republic visits the great synagogue of Porto in 2019.

18. Greetings between the Bishop of Porto and the president of the community in 2020.

19. A Sephardic wedding in the year 2021.

20. The community prays in the synagogue during Yom Kippur in 2021.

A rare gallery of paintings that tells Jewish history is always considered of significant cultural interest not only for the city of Porto, but also to the entire world. The exhibition serves as a living testament that goes beyond local history, offering universal insights into the human condition, including themes of resilience, migration, and the preservation of identity in diaspora.