The art gallery during the European Day of Jewish Culture. Credit: CIP/CJP
The Jewish Community of Oporto produced and created an art gallery, with paintings of great quality, using oil and acrylic techniques. They portray Jewish history in the city from the arrival of the first Jews to the present day.
The paintings are 1.5 m high and 1.5 m wide. They portray the life of the Jewish community in, 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 plague. The project was led by a Venezuelan artist from the community, Flor Mizhahi. She coordinated a team of Portuguese and foreign colleagues (Natalia Procopovich Bagur, Helen Doc, Analice Campos, Jorge Marinho and Adélia Costa), who were given the mission of carrying out that very special work. The paintings are exhibited in chronological order.
The painting gallery of the Jewish Community of Oporto
Let us make a brief description of each one, with their titles.
- The role of the Jews in the founding of the kingdom and their friendship with the monarchs.
- A market of the time, where Jews were prominent merchants.
- Religious Jews rule the community spiritually.
- The community prayed next to the walls of Oporto, facing Jerusalem.
- The role of the Jews in the development of the kingdom into a world power.
- Beit Midrash, dozens of men study the Torah.
- A ship full of Jews victimized by the edict of expulsion departs from Portugal in the fifteenth century.
- The forced baptism of adult Jews.
- The genocide of Lisbon.
- The decadence of Portugal after the anti-Jewish persecution.
- An auto-da-fé of the Inquisition in Oporto.
- A map showing the fates of the Portuguese Jewish diaspora.
- An Ashkenazi wedding in Oporto at the beginning of the twentieth century.
- The exterior image of the Kadoorie Mekor Haim synagogue in 1938.
- The community welcomes refugees from the Holocaust in 1940.
- A nun prays the Kaddish for a Jew who died in 1982.
- The President of the Portuguese Republic visits the great synagogue of Oporto in 2019.
- Greetings between the Bishop of and the president of the community in 2020.
- A Sephardic wedding in the year 2021.
- The community prays in the synagogue of Oporto during Yom Kippur in 2021.
