2023 experienced an important chapter in the history of Jews in Portugal. Thousands of copies of a special book were distributed worldwide, including embassies, libraries and schools. The book was published to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Porto community's official re-founding in 1923.

The President of the State of Israel thanked them for the gift and described the book as "a source of pride." The President of the Portuguese Republic described the book as "absolutely relentless." Hundreds of letters from political and cultural leaders of seventy nations were kept in the records of the Jewish Museum of Porto.

"Two Millennia of the Jewish Community of Oporto, Chronology 1923-2023" was not a simple book. The Jews have been present in Oporto for at least two millennia, preceding any memories or existing monuments in this city. The journey through time of this community to the present day has been marked by periods of joy and sadness, prosperity and ruin, life and death.

The book is composed by complementar chapters: The Jews of Oporto, At the Beginning, After D. Afonso Henriques, The Expulsion of the Jews, 19th Century, 20th Century, 21th Century, “Operation Open Door”: an old story, The Centenary in Modernity (1923-2023).

It is a large, bilingual volume written in both Portuguese and English, that spans over 600 pages, to chronicle the 2,000-year history of Jewish presence in Porto, Portugal, with a specific focus on its modern revival from 1923 to 2023.

The book documents how Jews lived in Porto since antiquity, survived centuries of the Inquisition as crypto-Jews, and formally organized again in the 20th century. A major focus of the book was honoring key historical figures like Captain Barros Basto, the Portuguese army officer who helped establish the community's central synagogue and fought against military discrimination. How a community that faced near-total destruction has rebuilt itself to house the largest synagogue in the country, a Holocaust museum, and members from over thirty nations?

In the 21th Century, the book focuses essentially on the work undertaken by the Jewish community of Oporto over the past decade and a half: a collective effort to revive both the living and the memory of the deceased, touching all significant dimensions of the Jewish world and bringing Jewish life to the city once again.

This topic would not have garnered worldwide interest if history had not repeated itself in its most shameful form. Community projects that were successfully realized were entirely silenced, falsified, and dishonored by mediocre elites within Portuguese politics and media. Driven by the “Palestinian question,” the mediocre elites used anonymous slander letters from a lunatic asylum, beat down the community, and even threw the justice system at it, given the social alarm they caused, with fabricated theses.

During centuries, the dregs of society always were used to attack the Jews and spread anti-Semitic hatred through language that invariably mixed politics, justice, and public outcry. The Jewish community and its prominent figures have been victims of local elites who, unnerved by their success, silenced facts, distorted intentions, and manipulated the meaning of everything to the detriment of their targets.

The book is proof that there have always been those who recorded the true history. The community leaders of each generation have a primary mission to document the events they witnessed and connect them with those experienced by their ancestors. By nature, Jews do not fight in the noisy limelight; they fight in history. Their mission is to ensure that the collective entity is accurately represented in the annals of history, regardless of the loss of individual reputation in the present generation.

According to the book distributed worldwide in 2023, it is impossible to engage in dialogue with adversarial forces of power or with majorities swayed by propaganda. However, Jewish works stand on their own merit; they do not die, fade, or easily succumb to their detractors. Instead, the executioners are condemned to leave a miserable legacy for posterity, just as those who persecuted the patriarchs, the sons of Jacob, and their descendants in Egypt, the wilderness, Babylon, Persia, Rome, Sefarad, and the Ottoman, British, Austro-Hungarian, Soviet, and Nazi empires, among many other places.