It is no coincidence that the Jewish community of Porto is recognized as the world leader in promoting Jewish culture, as no other local Jewish community has museums, cinemas, art galleries, and is able to attract 50,000 teenagers from national schools each year. These combined facts allow the organization to ensure that events of the utmost gravity, which are part of its millennial history in the city, even before Portugal existed, are not forgotten. One particular story has shocked teenagers every week. It is very recent and has not been lost in the froth of centuries.
On November 28th, 2022, Ilan Cohen – the main leader of the community's second synagogue – was the first signatory of a petition that 44 French students sent to the Portuguese parliament, which was then presided over by Augusto Santos Silva. The students' petition – which was reported in the international Jewish press on the same day it was sent – asked the State never again to illegally attack a Jewish community and cooperate with nocturnal burglars who broke down the doors of law offices and private homes (including the former president of SIRESP, Sandra Perdigão Neves) to steal a server and computers, and with anonymous whistle-blowers who have spent time in psychiatric hospitals and sentenced in the criminal courts.
On November 29, 2022, a tire on 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 PJN 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."
The Jewish museum still displays the sabotaged tire today. The case must be resolved by the Portuguese Rule of Law, especially since the matter was reported to the Mossad, as it cannot be forgotten and unpunished. Ilan Cohen, the petitioner's first signer, said to the Jewish News Syndicate that "The discrimination of the inquisition, was not enough for them to stop there!" and he immediately suspected that the authorship of the attempt against his life came from "a criminal network to silence me through a fatal accident". He had been studying in Porto for five years and it was the first time this happened.
The Portuguese Rule of Law
On March 11, 2022, the Portuguese State of Law raided the Kadoorie synagogue and the Jewish museum in Porto, calling "signals of a crime" to anonymous letters against community leaders supposed responsable to corrupting registry offices, which was found to be false later, as those leaders did not even know the address of any registry office.
Unlike what happened with the anonymous letters from the asylum, this time the Rule of Law did not find any "signals of a crime" or motivation to open an investigation regarding Ilan Cohen's case. Despite then Ilan Cohen filing a police report, 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. The room is filled with repulsive facts such as attempts to poison Israelis at a music festival (2025), lists of Jewish businessmen in newspapers (2024), Apartheid graffiti on the Porto synagogue (2023), nighttime robberies in an attempt to incriminate the owner of PT-Altice (2022) and so on until 2015.
Who is Ilan Cohen?
Ilan Cohen is not only the creator of the second synagogue of Porto's Jewish community. He is one of the most highly regarded members of Djerba. His family is one of the main promoters of the great annual Lag Baomer festival on the "Island of Kohanim". This name could not be more appropriate.
Local tradition dictates that a group of Kohanim (Jewish priests descended from Aaron) fled Jerusalem following the destruction of the First Temple by King Nebuchadnezzar II in 586 BCE. They stablished the El Ghriba Synagogue using a stone and a door salvaged directly from the destroyed Temple. For centuries, certain Jewish enclaves on the island, such as the village of Hara Sghira (Dighet), were populated strictly by Kohanim. This continuous presence has been preserved for roughly 2,500 years.
The island of Djerba houses one of the most culturally unique Jewish communities in the world due to its ancient priestly lineage and its vibrant, large-scale annual pilgrimage. The annual Lag BaOmer pilgrimage to El Ghriba is the ultimate centerpiece of Tunisian Jewish life, drawing visitors globally. Worshippers construct a large, pyramid-shaped chandelier called a Minara. It is draped in silk scarves, placed on a cart, and paraded through the streets amid singing, dancing, and traditional instruments. Women write the names of unmarried relatives or prayers for fertility on hard-boiled eggs and place them in a small cave beneath the synagogue’s altar.
While Lag BaOmer is celebrated globally with small bonfires, Djerba is historically the only place outside of Israel (specifically the mass gathering at Mount Meron) where Lag BaOmer takes the form of a massive, multi-day national holiday pilgrimage.
And now?
Portuguese teenagers demand that "their" Rule of Law act. It is fatal that the case will not be forgotten by the Jewish community and the state of Israel. To assume that something so serious, in a context of objective persecution that brought together all the powers of the Portuguese State and its media, will be forgotten, is to assume something absurd.
It is widely considered true that a defining characteristic of the Jewish people over the past four millennia is a deeply ingrained, structured commitment to remembering their history, engaging in active memory, and resisting the erasure of their collective story across generations.This enduring focus on memory is not merely nostalgia; it is a fundamental, functional, and ritualistic part of Jewish identity, often described as "Zakhor" (Remember) in Jewish thought, which appears hundreds times in the Hebrew Bible.
