In 2022, Portuguese politicians and media groups fueled by a "Palestinian” passion used his name to destroy a law that returned nationality to Jews of Portuguese origin and to hurt a Portuguese Jewish community with a full Jewish life. The union of powers was shouting for months that the so-called "oligarch" had bribed the Oporto Jewish Community by paying for the Holocaust museum and swore that his family had no Portuguese names.

However, the game didn't work very well. Oporto Jewish Museum now displays a letter to "Mr. Abel Benjamin Rocha da Leiva Leja Rosa Abramovich" or "Mr. Two Hundred and Fifty Euros, thank you". The Community also produced a short video on YouTube where the narrator reads the letter from beginning to end.

In September 1941, Nazi forces took over the Mažintai forest in Lithuania to execute the entire Jewish community of Eržvilkas. The Abramovich family escaped martyrdom because they had been kidnapped months earlier and sent to Russian territory by order of Stalin, the "father of the peoples," who was dissatisfied with them. Nachman Leibovich Abramovich, the great philanthropist of the Lithuanian Jewish community, was put in a cattle cart sent to the heart of Siberia, where he would die the following year in camp No. 7 of Nizhniaya Poyoma. He had committed the crime of working hard in the fertilizer trade, flax cultivation, fiber trade, and property leasing. He owned a hotel, beer warehouses, restaurants, and vast properties in Tauragė. He was hunted down like an animal at his residence, on a private plot of 26 hectares that extended to the Šaltuona River, and forcibly placed on a train that departed for the depths of Siberia, a journey of thousands of kilometers, along with a hungry crowd of other Jews crammed into hermetically sealed wagons, where a large portion of souls succumbed to the cold.

For the Soviet regime, one of the most perverse machines that the Jews have known in three millennia considered Nachman a despicable capitalist, a usurper, and an enemy of the people. His nuclear family, also uprooted from their homeland, included his wife, Tauba Leja Berkover, and the couple's three children: Leiva, twelve years old, Abraham, eight, and Ahron, only five, who never saw the head of the family again. Born into a wealthy Jewish family, Tauba owned, before the described fatality, a large ship dedicated to the transport of goods and passengers between Kaunas and Klaipėda.

The fortune of the young couple was not insignificant at a time when 80% of Lithuanian ships belonged to Jewish families. In the autumn of 1940, the Soviet authorities nationalized the assets of the Jewish community. For months, exhausting physical labor was Nachman's only companion in a place where temperatures hovered well below zero degrees. He cut trees, pruned wood, and transported long logs to warehouses. He worked 12-hour shifts and received two rations a day along with half a liter of ice-cold water. People died from exhaustion, lack of vitamins, dysentery, and work accidents. Communist slavery produced tons of corpses in that camp and many others, often piled into carts and dumped into mass graves. This was the fate of the most prominent figure of the Lithuanian Jewish community of the time and the source of sustenance for the most needy local families.

According to survivors of the camp, Nachman hoped to return to Lithuania with his beloved Tauba and their dear children, whose fate, although less tragic, was also painful. Uprooted from their land and the climate they were accustomed to, they soon found themselves without possessions, shelter, and food. They did not speak Russian and had landed in a completely unfamiliar place. Survival now depended solely on the mother. They faced the most complete misery in hostile territory. Yet, Tauba prevailed. During the day, she worked in a restaurant, and at night and on weekends, she made clothes, managing to gather clients among members of the Communist Party and their wives, as only that parasitic nomenclature possessed abundant wealth in those parts. The children, having overcome initial hunger and piercing bitterness, grew up healthy. Leiva and Abraham graduated from schools and technology institutes, and Ahron fell in love with music and soon began attending a suitable school and singing lessons. He played the violin and performed Lenski's arias, which could not have been more appropriate to the situation, given the need to mourn the loss of a great love – their father – and the transient fragility of human happiness.

The humbleness of the home Tauba cared for contrasted with a huge black grand piano, which she had managed to acquire, around which the children prayed for Nachman and, after his tragic death, for his soul of blessed memory. The mother raised the three children alone, in deep suffering. She never stopped writing to Soviet institutions asking for permission to return to Lithuania. The requests were rejected. She had been a very wealthy person and had to atone for her guilt until the end of her life. The last inglorious letter is dated 1957: "Painfully, I can no longer bear the northern climate. It has been 15 years since my husband passed away."

The remains of Nachman had long decayed in a mass grave. His brothers, Yosef, who left for the United States in 1902, and Mera, who went to South Africa in 1909, were more fortunate. They followed the usual path of a people of forced migrants in every generation, which continued until the founding of the Jewish state, and even after, as refugees from 11 Arab and Muslim countries poured in. Three siblings, each emigrating to a different distant destination in the early 20th century, clearly demonstrates the lack of sense in those who try to reduce the origins of Jewish families to simple formulas. This is especially so given that in addition to these permanent migrations there were marriages within indigenous Jewish communities, themselves composed of populations mixed under similar circumstances, amplified by the passage of centuries and successive generations.

The great-grandfather of Nachman, Wolf Abramovich (1745), bore the surname that traversed Eastern Europe from end to end and had long been recorded in lists of Iberian Sephardic Jews, notably among the members of the thriving Jewish community of Zamosc in 1580, including figures of great merit such as Samson Portugalensis, as noted in the "History of the Sephardim in Poland" by Dr. Gelber N. M. ("Otzar Yehudi Sepharad," Volume VI, published in Jerusalem in 1963).

Nachman's grandfather, Ber Abramovich (1780), married Malca, uncle to Rocha and Paya, and their son Leiva (1825), who married Hanna Rosa (1846), gave birth to Nachman (1884) – named after the Sephardic Kabbalist Nachmanides – who would marry Tauba Leja Berkover (1900), sister of Abel Benjamin (from the Hebrew Hebel and Binyamin), whose transport ship maintained the family tradition of maritime and river transport dating back to the Hanseatic League and Hamburg. Etymologically, Berkover, or Barkover, means precisely "boat owner" in Yiddish or, for those who prefer, "shipowner."

Chabad of Lubavitch, the largest Jewish religious organization in the world, confirmed the longevity and permanence of Sephardic rituals in the Abramovich/Berkover family, including during Passover (Pesach), which stemmed from the centuries-old connection between the Jewish communities of Hamburg and Keidany. As early as the 17th century, Rabbi Jeheskel Katzelenbogen led the first community, and his grandson, Rabbi Dovid Katzelenbogen, led the second. Both were descendants of Rabbi Yosef Karo, who lived in Portugal and wrote a timeless work that is still necessary for the Jewish world today, Shulchan Aruch.

At the beginning of the 1960s, Ahron, the youngest son of Nachman and Tauba, married the gentle Irina Mikhaylenko Grutman, a piano teacher born in Ukraine in 1940. When the young couple tragically passed away, their son – Roman Abramovich – was orphaned and had to be raised by his uncles. However, he was destined to succeed. His work resulted in wealth and, from a Jewish perspective, the recovery of property stolen from the family, a series of expropriations that he himself would later experience, with houses, boats, and planes not being spared, without ever mentioning even slightly the past of his immediate ancestors, which was instead expunged as inconvenient so that a new "legal" theft could be carried out joyfully and without impediments.

For three decades, socialists, communists, and liberals anchored in Bolshevik ideals and the philosophies of the Frankfurt School called him an "oligarch" and "Russian," giving him the same labels that had been imposed on his grandfather in the circumstances of time and place described above.

On July 16, 2020, with his Israeli passport, Roman Abramovich submitted a request to the Jewish community of Oporto for certification of his Sephardic origins, which had previously been affirmed by the local Chabad Lubavitch. With Portuguese family names and with Lithuanian children, by right, the candidate would delight various elements of the established powers in Portugal who sought to put an end to legislation they did not want and saw the Jews of Portuguese origin as an obstacle to the moral and material enrichment of the homeland, as if they suffered from the same ills attributed to unqualified immigration in general.

The certificate for Roman Abramovich, issued by the Community, is dated August 24, 2020, and attests that his Lithuanian family has Sephardic origins, with names, surnames, and memories that confirm this. On August 30, 2020, six days later, the community informed the Prime Minister's office that the applicant and other Jews familiar with the business world could invest in Portugal. The following month, on September 16, 2020, the organization had an official meeting with the Minister of Economy regarding the same topic. Another month later, on October 19, 2020, a letter was addressed to the Minister of Justice suggesting that if the legislation were to be changed, it should safeguard cases like Roman Abramovich's. Four months later, on February 3, 2021, the community wrote to the government official responsible for justice, requesting an urgent declaration in the administrative process of the applicant, to avoid a scandalous case like that of a philanthropist from Hong Kong who, for five long years, was a victim of the inertia of a car registry office (yes, a car registry office) regarding her nationality request, who succumbed to a disease given the applicant’s advanced age and the length of time that had elapsed; a huge loss for the country. Finally, on April 30, 2021, the government granted nationality to Roman Abramovich, which was done urgently for reasons of national interest. It was a voluntary and informed action by the State, which could have decided otherwise.

The Community issued a good-faith opinion, as it was supposed to. The registry office had legal obligations that it surely fulfilled, and the government granted nationality to the person concerned not only urgently but also with the certainty that he and his offspring would not burden public schools and national health services in Portugal – quite the opposite.

When admirers of the Soviet flag in Portugal – with the sickle, hammer, and golden star on a red background – celebrated, laughed, and mocked the name they had invented, Abramovich da Silva, they could have been more practical and honest by using names like Abel, Rosa, Benjamin, Leiva, Leja, Paya or Rocha, which are real and did not spontaneously germinate in the Urals.

From the widely proclaimed "Abramovich deal," it is worth noting the payment of the 250-euro fee by the "oligarch," while the Jewish community of Oporto donated a thousand times more (literally 250,000 euros) over the years to the Ukrainian and Russian communities overseen by the Chabad Lubavitch, of Portuguese origin, and with religious leaders of the same origin, starting with the Chief Rabbi of Kiev. Additionally, the community paid the taxes due on the "Russian" fee and even donated it in full to the registry office as a kind of Christmas gift. The only real problem occurred when the billionaire traveled to Portugal to receive his citizen card, as the lawyer instructed by the community to accompany him had to pay out of pocket the 300 euros required by the registry office, which also charges fees, as the interested party did not bring his wallet, if he ever uses it. The lawyer never asked for a refund, stating that she would have something valuable – the receipt – to show her grandchildren.

Roman Abramovich has long publicly revealed his interest in creating a foundation in Portugal to solidify his effective connection to the country and contribute to the Portuguese Jewish community, particularly in promoting Jewish heritage. He had previously contributed to such efforts in the Russian, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, American, and Israeli communities. However, he was never able to contribute to the community's cultural work. The film "1505 - The Lisbon Genocide," if it had been sponsored, would have been 90 minutes according its first script, but it ended up being shortened to 20 minutes, as the Community was prevented from asking for support from Jewish benefactors, just as the future Jewish Museum of Lisbon dragged on, stalled and without sufficient funds for its construction. Patrick Drahi was the museum's announced benefactor, but he too became unavailable to contribute because, as he was also the target of a "convenient" anonymous denunciation in the style of those that targeted a Judge called Ivo Rosa at the same year. These denunciations were apparently orchestrated from within the Portuguese political regime itself.

The accusations of tricks, of selling out their homeland, and unfair competition leveled against the Jews over time and throughout the world have never been true and have always deliberately silenced their vast good works, as if it were impure that, every Saturday night, that population would start working again with a vision for the future and dedication, not resting until the next Sabbath, much less spending Sundays eating, drinking, and gaining weight amidst psychological problems.

"Mr. Abel Benjamin Rocha da Leiva Leja Rosa Abramovich" inherited from the Jewish people a history that he repeated, and from his grandmother the resilience, labor, and passion for boats, and from his grandfather the entrepreneurship and Jewish philanthropy, particularly for the Chabad Lubavitch, headquartered in New York, and not by chance founded by a grandson and student of Rabbi Baruch Portugali, who lived in Poznan, Poland, where among many Iberian Sephardim there was a street named after the country of Dom Afonso Henriques and Yaish Ben Yahia, to whom much of Portugal's former economic, scientific, and military greatness is owed.