Born in Brooklyn into a community with 1 million Jews and numerous Jewish cemeteries where her parents rest, Marilyn Flitterman decided that the final resting place of her descendants will be in Portugal.

In recent weeks, the "boss" of the community decided to meticulously assess the Jewish cemetery of the Oporto community. The moment was significant. Marilyn saw in detail all the cemetery spaces and decided to buy tombs there for her children, son-in-law, daughter-in-law, and grandchildren.

The cemetery is located in a discreet location on the outskirts of Oporto. Peace reigns supreme. There are no tall buildings, streets, traffic lights, cars, or people talking loudly. It is a beautiful space, with grass, trees, a lake, and the chirping of cheerful birds.

The land was acquired by the community in 2016. The cemetery was inaugurated in 2023, after seven years of bureaucratic complications regarding its construction.

The new cemetery's name: "Isaac Aboab," the last Gaon of Castile who lived and died in Oporto after the expulsion of the Jews from Spain. However, after King Manuel's edict at the end of the 15th century, the Jews of Oporto were robbed of all their possessions and homes, and even the cemetery was dismantled.

In the 20th century, it had been Barros Basto's aspiration to build a cemetery for Oporto's Jewish community. He was unable to do so because the system wouldn't allow it. His successors, who in recent years contributed to the rehabilitation of Jewish religious life in Oporto, whether by rehabilitating and developing the infrastructure or by creating conditions for Judaism to flourish, did nothing more than fulfil a duty to the Jewish people and the history of Jews in Portugal, but they did. There had been no cemetery in the North of Portugal for five centuries.

When Marilyn Flitterman arrived in Porto in 1970, she saw little more than a handful of Jews. The reality changed radically in the meantime. Months ago, on Yom Kippur, Flitterman was in synagogue with her family and exclaimed that she "felt like being back in Brooklyn after almost sixty years."

Indeed, a historic milestone has been reached in 2025. Ten consecutive years of minyan on Shabbat and Yom Tov in the central synagogue, without a single interruption, is a source of great joy, especially since the community has a second synagogue, for young students, which has held a daily minyan for four years. Nothing similar has happened in Portugal since 1497, when Judaism was banned.

A common euphemism used for a Jewish cemetery is Beit Hachaim, a Hebrew term that literally means "house of the living". It reflects the Jewish belief in the immortality of the soul and the promise of resurrection. The cemetery is the place where the deceased await eternal life

The socialist political system disliked both the cemetery and the other Jewish works that flourished each year, but – as Marilyn Fliterman always maintained – "Nevertheless, everything is accomplished and now they will have to contend with the next generation. Our generation already won."