Today, January 27, International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the Holocaust museum in Oporto, Portugal, received a thousand students from Portuguese schools and the Israeli Ambassador to Portugal, Oren Rozemblat.

Having managed to maintain the utmost attention on the part of the many young people who listened to him at the only Holocaust museum in the Iberian Peninsula, Oren Rozenblat said, "80 years since the liberation of the Auswitz concentration camp, we have the duty to educate. This is exactly the good work of the Jewish Community of Porto that created this museum and many educational activities to teach about the Holocaust."

Full of objects left in the city in 1940 by refugees, the Holocaust museum in Porto is the only museum of its kind in Europe that is under the tutelage of a Jewish community. The leaders are people whose parents and grandparents lost their lives or were tortured during the tragedy that occurred between 1938 and 1945.

Speaking on behalf of himself and his colleagues who run the Holocaust museum, Michael Rothwell, the space's director, addressed a few words to the teenagers: "Many of the leaders of this space, like myself, grew up without grandparents, without joy and with traumatized parents. Some were shot after digging their own graves, others were cremated in the ovens of Auschwitz, others were killed by the exhaustion of the death marches. There are still shocking stories of those who survived, either because they went through Dr. Mengele's experiments, or because they managed to escape from Treblinka in great suffering, or because they were forced to play the violin in the Theresienstadt camp, to attract good publicity for the then Nazi regime."

The names of Rothwell's grandparents are displayed in this Room of Names of those who died in Auschwitz and he explained to the students that the roots of the Holocaust long predate the twentieth century. Jews were defamed as misers, murderers of children, and traitors to the homeland who pose a danger to society. The Nazis took advantage of ideas that came from previous centuries and put into practice a drastic solution to the 'Jewish question', an indiscriminate killing of Jews that had already been seen in many countries, including Portugal, but on a much larger scale."

The hostages of Gaza were not forgotten by the Israeli ambassador. "Since the 7.10.23 antisemitism rising its ugly face. We will fight it. The number of jews that were murder on that day was the higher since the Holocaust. But there is a difference - now we can fight back. And we do that until all our hostages come back", he said.

The policy of the Porto Holocaust Museum has been to explain to new generations of Portuguese people that the Holocaust did not arise in a vacuum, but was rather the result of dozens of smaller genocides that victimized the Jewish people over two millennia and in all latitudes.

Regarding the genocides that victimized the Jewish people for centuries, the Jewish Community of Porto presented in 2024 a film production about the Lisbon massacre in 1506, in which more than three thousand Jews were killed by the enraged population. This free film will be completed next May by a film about the abduction of 2000 Spanish Jewish children in 1493, a community´s project carried out together with the Hispanic Jewish Federation, based in Madrid, which is also building the Jewish museum of the Spanish capital, which will also dedicate a large space to the Holocaust.

"We are tired of empty speeches of 'never again', but rather we want to see measures that recognize the connection of the Holocaust with the genocides that have always victimized Jews everywhere under pretexts such as hostile culture, material interests and lack of patriotism," underlines the president of the Jewish community of Porto, Gabriel Senderowicz, a descendant of Polish Jews who fled in time to Brazil.