The rehabilitation of the Porto Jewish community, the central synagogue, the organization, and the scrupulous fulfilment of its social goals in religious and cultural terms, was based on a group of leaders who, for reasons of historical legitimacy, commitment, and culture, constituted and constitute the secular nomenclature of the Community to which they dedicated all their energies over the last decade and a half. It was an insane effort. They could do no more. And yet, the corrupt system sought – and failed – to "arrest" them all and label them "thieves" of the very Community they served. Allegedly, the State wanted to "protect" the Community. This is how far cynicism reaches!

What defines the rules and procedures of "Power" is the way the State organizes itself and acts, its axiological framework, the principles and specific individuals that govern the functioning of the executive, legislative, judicial, economic, and media branches, and the independence of each from the others. Today and always, human-established power regimes have flaws and weaknesses of varying magnitude, but the most basic symbol of democracy has been, since the Holocaust, the way the Jewish community, its work, and its leaders are treated.

For those who enjoy horror stories, reading the following lines is a treat. This is how elites imbued with a "Palestinian question" managed to deceive an entire society and set thousands of feet and mouths trampling on and insulting the only truly significant Jewish community in Portugal and its most productive, hard-working, and legitimate leaders.

1. Isabel Lopes – Born and raised in Oporto. She is the granddaughter of the "Portuguese Dreyfus." She grew up in a traumatized family. Her grandfather died with great sorrow in his heart, seeing his community destroyed by a coalition of the powers of his time. When her mother died, Isabel was called upon by the community, for reasons of family historical legitimacy, to serve as a point of balance among all members. An economist by profession, she accepted this mission two decades ago and has since served on the successive boards of the Community, whose accounts she still oversees with an iron fist. Isabel is primarily responsible for the miracle that regenerated the community officially founded by her grandfather. She never deserved to see her Jewish roots questioned by political and media elites and the door of her home nearly broken down by enraged police officers who brandished anonymous letters against her and her husband and searched for "suitcases of money" as if they were in an illegal casino.

2. Dara Jeffries - She has lived in Oporto for sixty years and is the daughter of the community's oldest member, Marilyn Fliterman, who is still called "the boss." As a child, Dara roamed the galleries of the empty synagogue with her brother, David, and the then-young Henrique Cymerman, now a renowned Israeli journalist. They were the only children at the time. A lawyer by profession, in 2008 she legally resurrected the organization, given that after Barros Basto's death, the community's association life practically died out and the records were lost. Her husband, Dale, whom we shall discuss below, presided over the community on several occasions. She is passionate about Jewish history and became a connoisseur par excellence, collaborating closely with the community's cultural department. Her work and legitimacy were equally scorned and tarnished by the Portuguese power system. The organization, they said, was a front for immoral business dealings.

3. Michael Rothwell - He has lived in Oporto for fifty years and has served on successive boards and fiscal councils within the community. Still a leader of the community today, he also oversees, as director, the Oporto Jewish and Holocaust museums, where for years he has welcomed thousands of children from Portuguese schools, as well as ambassadors from all over the world and other distinguished guests, including internationally renowned politicians. With a PhD in mathematics, Rothwell is a man of high culture frequently sought out by scholars from around the world who often travel to Oporto to learn about the local Jewish community and its long history. The Holocaust museum displays the names of his family members, murdered in Auschwitz-Birkenau after having endured seeing the windows of their shoe shop destroyed in Berlin during the infamous Kristallnacht. His work was not honoured, much less the organization he serves with such passion. Everything was called "opulence," "money," "illegitimacy," and "plunder"!

4. David Garrett - Born in Oporto, he shares the birth date of the "Portuguese Dreyfus." He never accepted the position of president of the community, never received a distinguished visitor, never held any position of institutional representation. He always maintained voluntary anonymity as much as possible. Israeli Ambassador Raphael Gamzou used to say he wanted to be received by Garrett when visiting the Jewish community in Oporto, to which he replied that he was not an institutional representative. However, this modest stance, coupled with the community's positive results, was one day exploited by the establishment to try to destroy him. They failed.

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Other victims

The unscrupulous disregard shown by the entire system of Power to the aforementioned leaders, and to their work, and to their belief, and to their intentions, extended to others, who worked closely with them in different circumstances and times and who deserve a mention in relation to their persons and missions, as follows.

5. Dale Jeffries presided over the community between 2012 and 2016. He was the best institutional representative the community ever had, due to the great cultural calibre he held, and the loving availability he always demonstrated to all who knew him, doing good justice to the fact that he was a descendant of Rabbi Elijah ben Solomon Zalman, the great Gaon of Vilna, a central figure in Lithuanian and world Judaism in the 18th century.

6. Eliezer Beigel was on the Board of Directors when the project began in 2012 and helped define and implement the guidelines that the community would later put in practice and follow to this day. A former student of Barros Basto, former president, and son of a former president of the Oporto Jewish Community, Beigel never failed to warn his colleagues, with his practical and sagacious spirit: "In Oporto, if you raise your head, the elites will cut it off!"

7. Débora Elijah served on the Board in 2012 and subsequent years. Raised within the Chabad of Lubavitch, her willpower and personal knowledge led to the community's connection to the global Jewish world and to pure Judaism. When she arrived in Oporto to pursue a doctorate in clinical psychology at a university, coming from the Orthodox neighbourhood of Golders Green in London, she found a decaying synagogue and a community devoid of religious and cultural resources. As she stated at the time, "This is not zero, it's well below zero. Absolute Shechina begaluta!"

8. Sam Elijah chaired the Board of Directors from 2016 to 2018, becoming its institutional representative in place of Dale. He brought to the community his religious fervour and his Indian Sephardic heritage, which directly connected him not only to a Jewish community of Portuguese origin but also to the Kadoorie family in Hong Kong, to which he is related. For the first time since its founding, the community was presided over by an immensely devout man who lived daily in a neighbourhood where 70 synagogues line the main street.

9. Yigal Benzion presided over the community from 2018 to 2022, replacing Sam. He was the first of the newcomers of Sephardic origin to merit being the community's leading institutional representative. Born in Uzbekistan, he came from a family from the former Ottoman Empire, spoke Portuguese, was a member of the Chabad Lubavitch community in Kfar Saba, and descended from the great Portuguese Gaon Yosef Karo (author of the Shulchan-Aruch) through the Katznenellenbogen rabbinical lineage.

10. Gabriel Senderowicz became the community's president in 2022, replacing Yigal, and has served until the present. Senderowicz became the community's first president after Captain Barros Basto to have a mission that encompassed institutional representation, control of all dossiers, the creation of significant cultural products, and the fierce fight against antisemitism, given his special sensitivity to the issue, resulting from centuries of persecution his family experienced from Poland to Moldova. Contributing to his mission was the fact that, in previous years, he oversaw several highly important community departments and witnessed with astonishment, but not surprise, the attacks by power that the community suffered from 2020 onward.

Ten names have been presented so far. Others deserve a mention, especially the religious nomenclature responsible for a decade of minyan, two synagogues, mikveh, cemetery, restaurants, shops, etc.

11. Sephardic Rabbi Yoel Zekri was responsible for bringing together the entire resident and newly arrived community, year after year, with inexhaustible energy, as well as nurturing the French Jewish youth who travelled to Oporto with him.

12. Sephardic Rabbi Haim Chettrit, of Chabad of Lubavitch, was responsible for overseeing, in recent years, that young and independent community with its own synagogue, in the best style of the institution founded by Rabbi Zalman of Liadi.

13. Ashkenazi Rabbi Daniel Litvak, who was given the Community the opportunity to lend his wisdom and the official recognition he holds before the Chief Rabbinate of Israel. It was no coincidence that Litvak left for Israel terrified, having been targeted by newspapers, illegally detained by the police, left in a cell without food for 36 hours, released into the freezing streets of Lisbon on Shabbat, assaulted in a supermarket by angry mobs, and placed in a situation of great danger by politicians who employed a wide variety of criminals: convicts, mentally ill individuals, night burglars, and car saboteurs.

A word of gratitude is merited to other great religious leaders who per many years supported and worked with the community on a weekly basis:

14. Eli Rosenfeld (rabbi and president of Chabad Portugal),

15. Doron Ahiel (rabbi of the London rabbinical court and president of Netzach Yisrael in the same city),

16. Asaf Portal (rabbi who presides over Ach Tov V'Chessed in London) and Zeev Sheinin (central figure of the rabbinate of Ashdod in Israel).

In addition, it is important to highlight many other rabbis who actively participated in the development of the community, in its major events, or in the organization's cooperation with the communities they managed in other countries.

17. Menachem Margolin (Director of the Rabbinical Center of Europe and President of the European Jewish Association);

18. Yisrael Lichtenstein (London rabbinical court);

19. Yechiel Wasserman (rabbi of the World Jewish Agency);

20. Isaac Haleva Z"L (Sephardic Chief Rabbi of Turkey);

21. Abraham Serruya (Chief Rabbi of the Sephardic community of Sucat David);

22. Shalom Greenberg (Chief Rabbi of Chabad of Lubavitch in Shanghai, China);

23. Yosef Carmel (Jerusalem rabbinical court);

24. Yisroel Kozlovsky (Chief Rabbi of Chabad of Lubavitch in Mumbai, India);

25. Dovid Slavin (Chief Rabbi of Chabad of Lubavitch in Sydney, Australia);

26. Berel Lazar (Chief Rabbi of Chabad of Lubavitch in Moscow, Russia);

27. Jonathan Benyamin Markovitch (Chief Rabbi of Chabad of Lubavitch in Kyiv, Ukraine);

28. Avraham Wolff (Chief Rabbi of Chabad of Lubavitch in Odessa, Ukraine);

29. Haim Lazar (Chief Rabbi of Chabad of Lubavitch in Crimea);

30. Yossi Simon (Chief Rabbi of Chabad of Lubavitch in London, UK);

31. Moshe Friedman Z"L (Chief Rabbi of Chabad of Lubavitch in Bahia Blanca, Chabad Center in Argentina);

32. Yosef Kantor (Chief Rabbi of Chabad of Lubavitch in Bangkok, Thailand);

33. Yeshaya Cohen (Chief Rabbi of Chabad of Lubavitch in Astana, Kazakhstan);

34. Yaakov Lazarus (Chief Rabbi of Chabad of Lubavitch in Johannesburg, South Africa);

35. Dovid Libersohn (Chief Rabbi of Chabad of Lubavitch in Barcelona);

36. Shlomo Bistritzky (Chief Rabbi of Chabad of Lubavitch in Hamburg);

37. Avi Webb (Chief Rabbi of Chabad of Lubavitch in Brooklyn, United States);

38. Aharon Kanevsky (Chief Rabbi of Chabad of Lubavitch in Kfar Saba, Israel);

39. Eliezer Wolff (Chief Rabbi and member of the Rabbinical Court of Europe);

40. Abraham Levi (Chief Rabbi of the Spanish & Portuguese Congregation of London);

41. Elia Israel (rabbi of the Spanish & Portuguese Congregation of London);

42. Yaakov Tenenbaum (president of Kehilat Mishkan Ba'abad of Jerusalem);

43. David Kahan (president of two Kolelin in Jerusalem);

44. Mendy Wilansky (Chabad of Lubavitch, Moscow);

45. Lazar Yisroel (Chabad of Lubavitch, Moscow);

46. Eli Hayon (Paris);

47. David Marciano (Paris);

48. Raphael Cohen (Jerusalem);

49. Tuvia Od (Tel Aviv);

50. Leib Lebel (Ashdod), descendant of Bal Shemtov and owner of tefillin that date back to Portugal centuries ago.

Those fifty names perhaps are enough to understand the global scope of the work produced by the Jewish Community of Porto in the last decade and a half. Fifty names are also enough to understand why all the powers of the Portuguese State wanted to call the Community corrupt and now face the spell turning against the sorcerer, because it is the Community that has called corrupt the very State that intended to kill it and yet failed miserably.

What the Powers in Portugal attacked in 2022 was not some focus of evil within a Jewish community. It wasn't even character A or B. It was the entire Jewish world, across all continents, and the State of Israel. This is what the political and media powers sought to hunt down and punish.

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Why?

The entire Portuguese power system is hostage to the moral ideology that stems from the Bolshevik Revolution and its libertarian realignment with the identity politics of the Frankfurt School. The system is incompatible with what Jews represent—tradition, religion, culture, work, success, cosmopolitanism, the State of Israel—which inspires nothing positive in the system that wants to see everyone as "equal" in mediocrity. What Jews produce is silenced, so as not to appear unequal and anchored in an ethical tradition that the system deems anachronistic. The protection they deserve is vilified. Antisemitism falls outside the endless categories of racism that make the elites scream and exaggerate daily. Jews don't count. They are defended by no one: neither politicians, nor newspapers, nor courts.

The greatest antagonism against the small state emerged from the Soviet Union from the 1950s. Thus arose the trend of KGB-trained "liberation movements," which brought the PLO to Palestine. The "Palestinian cause" still dominates political debate in Portugal today. The Guterres, Costas, and Silvas, as well as the Sanchezs, Lulas, and Maduros from other countries—all these comrades and personal friends have Soviet socialist roots, as do their countries' constitutions, proudly called "fundamental laws." All Jews—considered Israelis—are included in the oppressor classes, never in the oppressed. Seen as wealthy, educated, traditionalists, connected to the banks and government palaces of all major nations, they are attacked for their alleged standard of living, from which a privilege, an "injustice" toward others is inferred. Which others? Everyone.

The Portuguese socialist system in power in 2022 associated Israel with the United States, imperialism, the stock market, the banking sector, and the lobby, not with a territory that had only poor people and camels and transformed into a scientific powerhouse, not with a country without natural resources that today drinks from the sea, thrives in agriculture, and exports food, medicine, security, and technology. The prevailing axiological framework in Portugal tends to disregard the synagogue Jew, the business Jew, and the successful Jew—that is, the traditional Jew—as well as the community that is by far the strongest in numerical, religious, and cultural terms. Added to all this is a hostile sentiment toward the Jew of the nations: the Jewish state.

For a scholar of antisemitism, it's quite interesting to see how a state tried to destroy the Porto Jewish community and in fact destroyed a law benefitting Jews of Portuguese origin and the most important community. It was all simple. The government was inspired by a "Palestinian issue" and planted a fake news story in a newspaper. Then, the same government usurped parliament's functions and issued an illegal decree, striking a blow to that law, which became lame. Then, parliament passed a law overriding the illegal decree and made it retroactive so as not to lose its effects. Immediately afterward, the Constitutional Court said yes to everything and praised the socialist justice minister for her "concerns."

Judicial bodies with leaders appointed by the same minister moved in on a community. Illegal searches took place in the country's largest synagogue. The name of the institution and its leaders was destroyed. Lists of Jewish businessmen appeared in newspapers as culprits for the housing crisis. Nighttime burglars raided homes, law offices, and the former president of SIRESP (National Social Security Administration) and stole computers and servers in search of incriminating evidence. Tens of thousands of hate messages were produced against the community. Newspapers and television stations celebrated. The old Marxist system appeared largely satisfied. "It's the rule of law working," "it's democratic scrutiny," they cried, ridiculously, immersed in a system with serious antisemitic tendencies.