Jewish Museum of Porto will be active and open to the general public on Sunday, September 6th, 2026, alongside the Kadoorie Mekor Haim Synagogue and the Holocaust Museum, in celebration of the European Day of Jewish Culture.
The museum features several different rooms dedicated to specific themes, including a dedicated room on modern antisemitism. It is in this room that surprises await.
The texts, objects and exhibition materials in this room are in chronological order. Visitors are generally terrified by what they see. For years, a mainstream Portuguese newspaper published materials about the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”. In 2020, Portuguese elites tried to end the Nationality Law in favour of Portuguese Sephardic Jews, by means of a defamation campaign against the Jewish communities involved in the certification process. In 2022, the Portuguese government used journalists, influencers, anonymous accusers, anonymous sources and Lisbon prosecutors and police to end the Sephardic law and bring down the leaders of the Jewish Community of Oporto, the strongest in Portugal and the only one that exclusively certified Jews. In 2023, the Portuguese press continued to use anonymous sources to underline the “mercantilism” of the Israelis, bastardised the law granting Portuguese nationality to Jews of Portuguese origin and deleted all the facts that could contradict the shameless theory set out in the text. In 2024, a demonstration for better housing in Oporto rails against “murdering Zionist landlords” that it identifies with “Boavista”, the area of the city’s central synagogue. In 2025, there was an attempted poisoning of Idraelite Jews at a music festival, which received no political condemnation. In the same year, the Hamas embassy was inaugurated in Lisbon.
The PJN knows that the museum is preparing to present facts and materials about an attempted assassination. On November 28, 2022, the young French Jewish leader Ilan Cohen was the first signatory of a petition that 44 French students sent to the Portuguese parliament. He was then the coordinator of one of the synagogues in the Porto Jewish Community.
The student's petition – which was reported in the international Jewish press on the same day it was sent – asked the Portuguese State never again to illegally attack a Jewish community, as it had done months before with the one in Porto, and do never again to cooperate with the nocturnal burglars who robbed the president of SIRESP (Integrated System for Portugal's Security and Emergency Networks) and law offices to steal a server and computers, and with anonymous whistle-blowers who have spent time in psychiatric hospitals and sentenced in the criminal courts, in an attempt to incriminate people. Cohen stated to the Jewish News Syndicate that "The discrimination of the inquisition, was not enough for them to stop there!"
On November 29, 2022, a tire on Ilan Cohen's car was carefully punctured so as to be on the verge of bursting while he was having dinner at a kosher restaurant in Porto. After dinner, he went home on the highway, where speeds reached about 120km/h, and "miraculously the tire did not burst", Cohen said to The Portuguese Jewish news at the time. "Taking the VCI (highway), my car had trouble driving, and I was very lucky, I stopped and saw stab wounds in my tires." He also suspected that the authorship of the attempt against his life came from "a criminal network to silence me through a fatal accident", as he had been studying in Porto for five years and it was the first time this happened.
Despite then Ilan Cohen filing a police report (Case number 2042/22.6PIPRT), he has received no news about the matter to this very day. The authorities have not even notified him to be questioned as the whistleblower. Meanwhile, the damaged tire is on display at the Jewish Museum in Porto, in a room dedicated to modern antisemitism.
