The UK premiere of the film “1506 The Lisbon Genocide” took place on Sunday evening 12 May 2024 at Kesher in Golders Green, North West London.
In front of a large enthusiastic audience, the event was superbly hosted by Rabbi Rashi Simon who is a great connoisseur of Jewish history in Europe in general and in the Iberian Peninsula in particular. In wake of the October 7th massacre, the film shows that "pogroms do not happen in a vacuum”, said the Rabbi.
The film was officially released on April 19th, the anniversary of the date when the rampage against the Jews began, with thousands of Jews of all ages being hunted, decapitated, burned, and mutilated, with victims being paraded in the streets, in scenes eerily reminiscent of the massacre on Simchat Torah in the south of Israel.
The film was very well received by the audience in Golders Green. It created much good lively discussion afterwards for the question and answer panel of Rabbi Rashi Simon, Debora Elijah (board member of the Jewish Community of Oporto) and Yosef Teixeira who is a Sephardic Jew of Portuguese origin whose family fled Portugal after that genocide.
This was a truly excellent event and presentation of a very dark period in Jewish history. There were so many victims the pogromists wanted to burn that there wasn’t enough firewood to fuel the city’s pyres. “To know the 1506 massacre in Lisbon is to know the historic genocides of Jews all over Europe", Debora Elijah said.
