The stereotypes linking Jewish people to money and deceitful tricks are ancient and persistent antisemitic myths. What happened in the last few days in Portugal is further proof of this. The controversy centers on an "expenses-paid trip" by eight Portuguese influencers to Israel and Gaza, criticized by the entire Portuguese press as a public relations "stunt to polish Israel's image". The group traveled from July 19 to 25, 2026.

Portuguese major outlets sought formal comment from the Israeli Embassy in Portugal, which maintained that such visits are part of standard international public diplomacy. Israeli ambassador Oren Rozenblat stated that these trips are part of regular embassy work, aimed at correcting a distorted public image. His key positions include: routine outreach, combating wrong media narratives, and showing the country directly. Part of normal work Inviting different groups, reaching out to public figures, correcting the Image, blaming local media coverage, claiming Portugal's view is wrong, encouraging firsthand experiences.

The embassy framed the initiative naturally, comparing it to delegations for journalists or startup hosts. In turn, creators maintained that they were not paid fees and faced no conditioning or censorship regarding what they posted.

A repeated story

On 22.11.2023, with the report "Passports – Israel", by SIC television channel, its authors aimed to spice up the parliamentary discussion that was then taking place regarding the legislation that granted nationality to Jews of Portuguese origin, and which would give rise to Organic Law No. 1/2024, of 5 March, which established the need for applicants to prove ownership or transmission of inherited assets, legal residence in Portuguese territory for a period of three years, or the current effective connection to Portugal through regular contacts with the community.

The authors, in fact defendants, knew that the programme they aired did not seek to clarify, but rather to "poison", the population, regarding (i) the nature and respectability of the Jewish Community of Porto, (ii) the requirements of the legislation, and (iii) with regard to the Jewish population theoretically applicable within its scope, three intertwined issues.

From the anonymous sources cited in the piece, speculation emerged rather than information, and insinuations and accusations rather than concrete evidence and empirical factors, which objectively tarnished the reputation of the Community and discriminated against persons on the grounds of their origin, culture and religion. The anonymous sources cited were not even in a position to have direct knowledge of the information.

The successive exhibition of anonymous sources in the television piece under consideration here – as well as everything else – was acknowledged to be authorised by the station's director of information and brother of Prime Minister of the time, who was responsible for knowing the identity of the sources and verifying that they complied with those guidelines and that they had no interests at stake.

A piece that claimed to be informative, aimed at millions of people, made no reference to the names and connections to Portugal of the 25 national victims of a Massacre/Genocide that took place 45 days earlier (on October 7, 2023 in Israel), which were already known at the time (and the hostage crisis was the subject that marked the news around the world), as well as their family stories.

The whole piece called "Passports - Israel" was a construction in bad faith, to denigrate and slander the legislation to be revoked and the Jewish Community of Porto, which was not sought and heard about anything at all, and not even transmitted its official positions.

The piece gave shelter to the anonymity of sources so that they could formulate judgments of suspicion and report alleged facts that, without the proper contextualization and respect for the contradictory, sounded like total shenanigans and corruption, which was intended.

Flagrant examples of what has been stated in the previous point are as follows:

- 21'04 "It's logical, here... mercantilist in the Middle East. They sell everything. It gets to the point, just to tell you... The package is so complete that they even sell... in the complete package the vacancy at the Consulate." (Anonymous source)

- 21'19 "They have a whole system built around this. And they are making a lot of money. The Portuguese government opened this... someone 'sniffed' the business and they started doing what they could." (Anonymous source)

- 23'16 "What is a legal form? What is an illegal form? Abramovich paid someone to have the papers..." (Source: anonymous)

- 19'09 "They check in with their Portuguese passports. We see it by name. When we approach the person... Don't you speak Portuguese? 'Oh no...'. Then show your passport there... When we asked him what he was doing here... 'I just came to get the passport.'" (Anonymous source)

- 19'24"Flights have increased, I think now there are 12 flights a week and they want to get to 19" "Because of that?" "Yes." (Anonymous source)

The piece also made use of identified sources from which phrases or loose words were cut out that fit the persecutory exercise that was intended, demonstrating bad faith and intention to offend the good name of the Jewish Community of Porto. An example of what was set outin the previous point was the case with regard to lawyer Leon Amiras, Vice-President of the Israel Bar Association, hired by the Jewish Community of Porto in January 2018 to try to put an end to the abusive advertising that was practiced in the Jewish State. He was presented in the report as being a "legal advisor" to the Community, without explaining for a moment what his function was. The journalist intended to collect and cut, and he collected and cut, from his mouth, the reference to scandalous facts for the common Portuguese citizen, without mentioning that this was what he fought and that he was paid to fight.

- 20'47 "A photograph of a dog... with a passport in his mouth saying 'We'll take your passport. We want you to become a Portuguese citizen.'" (Leon Amiras)

- 16'03 "Portugal gave this citizenship process on a platter without looking for problems." (Leon Amiras)

The report/piece omitted the official positions of the Jewish Community of Porto on any matter that concerned it. For example, the piece presented with an air of scandal the nationality attributed to the American influencer Nethaniel Drew, as if it were a proven case of corruption, without clarifying the position of the Jewish Community of Porto in this regard, already contained in open sources (and even in Rights of Reply), namely that his grandmother, Liliana De Pas, she belonged to a traditional family of Portuguese and Castilian origin, who lived in Egypt, and was the granddaughter of David De Paz, born in the Sephardic community of Turkey in the nineteenth century.

On this case of Nethaniel Drew, the report was reduced to a sentence from him in a Youtube video – 20'04 "In a way, I feel that I deceived the government because I don't live here and I don't even have Portuguese family", without even explaining that, according to the law, people were exempt from living in Portugal or speaking Portuguese (6/7 LN). Pure bad faith, always and permanently, aimed at a Jewish minority.

The report also focused on the popularly magnetic name of Roman Abramovich, as if it were a proven case of corruption.

- 23'16 "Abramovich paid someone to have the papers..." (Anonymous source)

- 24'15 "In 2 and a half months, the oligarch who in 2003 became the owner of Chelsea, added the Russian and Israeli passports, the Portuguese. The last step of a process in which he delivered to the Jewish Community of Porto a declaration attesting to the Sephardic origin, an investigation into the surname Abramovich, a copy of the Israeli passport and proof of the bank transfer of a fee of 250 euros from an account at the UBS bank.

The position of the Jewish Community of Porto in this regard, contained in open sources, was not mentioned, since it was important to maintain the nebulous thesis of a mere "declaration attesting to the Sephardic origin" and "an investigation into the surname Abramovich". It was not interesting to mention either the prior certification of Chabad Lubavitch, or the fact that Abramovich's children were Lithuanian citizens by family law, or the fact that that surname had been registered in the Portuguese Sephardic community of Zamosc in 1580. Much less the report was interested in disseminating the names and surnames of the grandparents, great-grandparents and other ancestors of the target – Abel, Rocha, Leiva, Leja, Rosa, Barkover, Paya, etc.

None of this interested the report, as the country was – and is – rocked by the mediatically created "Abramovich Tablet", in the midst of the war in Ukraine. It is not surprising that, in the midst of so many wars conglomerates in one, the granddaughter of the "Portuguese Dreyfus" (the founder of the institution) has fallen into depression.

The report "Passports – Israel" contacted an Israeli company versed in nationality with the defendant 2 posing as a customer – "We complete the process for our customers. In Lisbon it takes much longer. But in Porto it's ok. I can help you get to the Porto Conservatory... We have our lawyers there..." (22'26) –, without the report clarifying to the public that the Lisbon Registry Office has been processing cases since 2015, while the others, such as the one in Porto, started working years later, and therefore were less overloaded with work, which is why they were preferred by lawyers who processed cases certified by the Jewish Community of Porto or the Jewish Community of Lisbon. Bad faith has proceeded at a good pace.

The report, which claimed to be informative – and which dealt with the Jewish minority, the Jews, the Israeli population and the Jewish State – omitted the requirements of the legislation at stake and the procedures that involved the Jewish Community of Porto, the Registry Office and the Government, respectively, with the aim of placing the blame for an alleged illegal swindle on the former.

The defendants knew that the "Certificate of Jewish Community" (24-A, 3 c)) did not exempt the applicant from demonstrating to the Central Registry Office "the circumstances that determine the tradition of belonging to a Sephardic community of Portuguese origin" (24-A, 2) and, at the end of the administrative process: "The Government could [or could not] grant nationality" (24-A, 3 c) 1).

The defendants also knew that in general no living Jew did have or could have any genealogical tree documentable from generation to generation, or other document dating back to Portugal centuries ago, just as they knew that the legislation did not require them, but used illustrative criteria such as "surnames" and "family memory" (24-A, 3 c) RN).

The defendants knew that the Sephardic communities of Portuguese origin (mixed with those of Spanish origin, and autochthonous origin, by virtue of marriages for twenty generations) were mentioned for example in the Preamble of the 2015 Decree, an interpretative element of the diploma, by prescribing that the traditional Sephardic families of North Africa and Gibraltar "returned" to Portugal after the Inquisition, which, in the understanding of the Jewish Community of Porto (and the particular stories of the Hamas hostages in 2023 proved it), would necessarily apply to the traditional Sephardic families of the former Ottoman Empire, whose geographies were (also) summarized in that preamble text, when referring to "some regions of the Mediterranean (Gibraltar, Morocco, South of France, Italy, Croatia, Greece, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and Algeria), northern Europe (London, Nantes, Paris, Antwerp, Brussels, Rotterdam and Amsterdam), Brazil, the West Indies and the USA".

The defendants also knew that the Jewish people are a people of forced emigrants who have always essentially intermarried, which is why their Portuguese origin was reflected in such remarkable historical figures as the Polish Haim Salomon (co-founder of the USA, who spoke the Ladino language), Boris Epstein (first advisor to President Donald Trump and from the Portuguese Benveniste family), Laura Mocatta Kadoorie (the first lady to drive a car in China), Abraham Salem (the Portuguese Jew from Cochin who was a key figure in India's Independence), Horace Gunzburg (the "Russian Rothschild" of the Porto family), Moses Montefiore (the British banker of the Lumbrozo de Mattos Mocatta family), and the Portuguese Shalom Sheetrit (the "Moroccan" signatory of Israel's Declaration of Independence).

The defendants knew that Israel is the country that concentrates the largest absolute number of Jews in the world, 7.7 million souls, which represents about 50% of the entire global Jewish population. They knew that, according to official data from the State of Israel available in open sources, the population of the Jewish State comprises about 1 million Jews from traditional Sephardic families of Moroccan origin (10% of a population of 10 million people), the same people whom the preamble of the 2015 Decree-Law called "returnees".

The defendants knew that, adding that percentage to the other Israeli families of North African origin (Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, etc.) and of the former Ottoman Empire (Greece, Turkey, Balkans, etc.), Israeli citizens of Iberian descent probably exceed 20% of the total population of Israel.

The defendants also knew that it was natural, and not a scandal, that the overwhelming majority of applications for Portuguese nationality came from Israel, not because "the Israelis sell everything" (as they published), but because there would potentially be two or three million possible candidates.

The defendants knew that, as the Gaza hostage crisis has shown, Israeli Jews as a rule hold other nationalities, from dozens of other countries on all continents, from which they or their parents, grandparents and great-grandparents left in more or less tragic conditions, a situation that reflects centuries of diaspora, persecution and the heritage of refugees and survivors. not forgetting the so-called Holocaust of the Jews in 11 Arab and Muslim countries and who arrived in Israel with a suitcase of clothes.

The defendants knew that there is no lack, and never have been since 1948, of Israeli companies specializing in nationalities, which makes the report full of excerpts such as the following even more sinister:

- 22'10 - "Hidden on the second floor of a run-down building in the middle of an industrial zone in TelAviv, the most famous of the agencies created in Israel received thousands of clients to whom it promised their passport through privileged contacts in Portugal".

"Privileged contacts in Portugal" for what, from what, from whom? In the Government? At the Registry Office? Or in the Jewish Community of Porto, where all Israeli Jews are welcomed as an integral part of the congregation and enjoy the same rights as everyone else? It would be normal to have good relations with the community. All Jews have it.

The defendants knew that the distasteful publicity in the State of Israel – the state of forced migrants – is a fact in relation to multiple nationalities, and it is enough to visit Ben Gurion airport or any shopping center or stationery store to confirm this, and it is not credible that there is any "hidden" building, something unintelligible and astonishing to anyone who knows the slightest bit about Israeli society.

Portuguese nationality did not escape this massive, and often tasteless, dissemination – 20'20 "There was an advertisement to obtain a Portuguese passport on buses." (Lawyer Adam Yadid) – and for this very reason the Jewish Community of Porto hired a lawyer to fight it, something that – in fact – should have been the responsibility of the Portuguese State and not of a private organization. Yet, the report reduced this important issue and this effort of the Community to a supposed "dog with a passport in its mouth"!!

The defendants knew that in Brazil, Angola, Goa, Bangladesh and other locations there is also advertising in bad taste in relation to Portuguese nationality, but only the Israeli one caused so much commotion to the now accused, which justifies the well-known Jewish refrain: "Jews are News!"

More. - 16'12 "Did you find it too easy? (...) It was strangely easy (...) I hope the Portuguese Government doesn't mind the fact that it's so easy..." (Dialogue between Jonatan Markish and friends.)

Again, easy in what, of what, why? Would there be corrupt people in the Government? Money in boxes of wine mixed with Israeli passports? Or did the Registry Office work smoothly when the applicant applied for nationality? The tone of the report was always the same: ridicule, banditry, suspicion, with the Jewish Community of Porto as a backdrop.

What the piece "Passports - Israel" did deliberately was to present the legislation and the Jewish Community of Porto as a Green Way for unqualified foreigners… And this has occurred in a country with more than 1 million unskilled immigrants and whose authorized media (yes, it is necessary a license) is constantly crying out for more and more.

The Jewish Community of Porto is recognized in the international Jewish press as a world leader in the promotion of Jewish culture. The sources are open. Yet, in the play "Passports – Israel", the Jewish Community of Porto was not mentioned as being a culturally relevant institution (despite producing/tutoring museums, history films, an art gallery, a library with 10,000 Jewish works, a choir, etc.), but was systematically related to cases of alleged forgery (Netanel Drew, Roman Abramovich, thousands of applicants desirous of a valuable passport, etc.), and for this purpose anonymous sources made their appearance, with extraordinarily serious accusations, and without contradiction, which were shown to millions of people on television.

The defendants deliberately did not explain to their audience that all the departments of the Jewish Community of Porto are notoriously and recognizably stronger than those of the smaller Jewish Community of Lisbon, and that while the former only certified people within the Jewish world, the latter was essentially dedicated to non-Jews of Jewish descent and to long genealogies until discovering a Jew, as happened with Father Jesus of Colombia (CIL certificate no. 1060/2016), who was certified based on genealogical drawings that certainly took a lot of time for the Jewish Community of Lisbon (perhaps days, weeks), and for the analysis of which the State would never have needed the support of the Jewish communities.

Without providing any explanation regarding the facts expressed throughout this legal accusation, because the "suspects" should be only the Jews, never any Father Jesus of Bogotá, the defendants cried out: 25'42 "In Portugal, more than 80 thousand processes certified by the Jewish Community of Porto were seized, a high number when compared to the number of certifications made in the same period by the Community of Lisbon".

To give a sinister air to the situation, as if they were in the chapter of major crimes, the report returned to the charge with the famous "Operation Open Door", without dedicating a word to the Lisbon Court of Appeal, which on 28.09.2022 reduced such an operation to "nothing".

The defendants were well aware that that failed operation was triggered, not through the fault of the judicial operators, but by the social alarm that convenient fake news caused (remember what appears in open sources: "Abramovich", "financed by the Holocaust Museum of Porto" and entangled in "Wikipedia tricks").

The defendants also knew, as previously reported in the Portuguese press, that it was the Minister of Justice named Francisca Van Dunen who, on 28.12.2021, sent that fake news of 18.12.2021 to the PGR of her appointee Lucília Gago, and that it was in this sequence that "Operation Open Door" was born, directed by the same Albano Pinto who had in hand the cases against Judge Ivo Rosa, a scandal such that, if it had occurred in the USA, it would have already filled the wing of a prison with those responsible. The “separation of powers” at its worst.

The report "Passports – Israel" cries out:

- 24'47 "On August 24, 2020, the rabbi of the Jewish Community of Porto certified that Roman Abramovich is a direct descendant of Portuguese Sephardim."

- 25'12 "The rabbi is detained at the airport when he was preparing to travel to Israel, the next morning he is released, however the coercive measures that were applied were also reduced and withdrawn and he is now in Israel as far as I know."

Absolute bad faith again, since it is deliberately not clarified that that Ashkenazi rabbi has always lived in Israel (where he has a house, wife, children and grandchildren), that the Jewish Community of Porto is a Sephardic congregation and that it has long handed over its synagogues to other rabbis and, in particular, to Chabad Lubavitch, so that the Portuguese system of power (political and media) would no longer dare to persecute isolated Jews.

The defendants knew that the strongest Jewish religious organization in the world, Chabad Lubavitch, now based in New York, but born in the Russian city of Lubavitch, was founded by the grandson of Rabbi Baruch Portugali, just as they knew – in view of the official positions of the Jewish Community of Porto – that Chabad Lubavitch was responsible for certifying the never enough "Russian oligarchs" – as the two known Portuguese, Roman Abramovich (of Lithuanian father and Ukrainian mother) and Andrey Rapaport (of Ukrainian parents) – whom the Community affectionately calls "gentlemen 250 euros, thank you!"

The law required that the applicants be Jews of Portuguese origin, whether poor or rich, from Congo or Siberia, and the logic that presided over the press fashion of the "Russian oligarchs" is incomprehensible.

- 25'45 "Applications for nationality made by a number of Russian oligarchs have become public."

The defendants call "Russian oligarchs" the Jews whose families were robbed of everything during the USSR, and who nevertheless enriched themselves with work to recover the fortune of their parents and grandparents. Everyone knows how to understand the world as they want. So did the Jewish world. As an example, Abramovich is seen in Portugal as a parasite full of luxuries and boats (barcos), without bothering to find out that his grandmother Barco-ver had her boats stolen from her in 1941 and her husband was murdered in Siberia in 1943, after decades of supporting the Lithuanian Jewish community.

The defendants, animated by the desire that Russian Jews had nothing to do with Iberia, never cared about the origins of Chabad Lubavitch (with thousands of emissaries all married to each other) or even of the world's first "oligarch" – the "Russian Rothschild", Baron Horace Günzburg (1833–1909).

The defendants had a duty to convey to the public – and they did not do so deliberately – that, under the terms of the applicable legislation, the Central Registry Office could not agree with the opinions of Chabad Lubavitch and the Jewish Community of Porto in relation to such "Russian oligarchs", and to any other applicants, especially Israelis, given that – although the latter's work was prior and independent – the IRN also had the legal obligation to (i) receive, (ii) to analyse and (iii) to give an opinion on the applicants' documentary allegations regarding their Jewish-Portuguese origins, in order to issue an Opinion to the Government, which was responsible for using its legal discretionary power to grant nationality or not.

The report "Passports - Israel" aimed to serve a Portuguese political strategy that unfortunately was hostile to the Jewish world and to the Israeli world and that had the power and intention to promote hatred and discrimination against the synagogue, museum and other institutions of the Jewish Community of Porto, as well as against local Jews, more than a thousand and a half people of mostly foreign origin. In between, the Hamas embassy in Lisbon was inaugurated.

The report led by the defendants was not limited to spreading untrue facts captiously placed in the mouths of mysterious "sources" and through selected clippings and criminal insinuations that could never have been shown in a respectable television.

The defendants intended to promote hatred against the Jewish Community of Porto, well knowing that, due to similar news and reports, thousands of messages could already be found in the comment boxes of newspapers and on social networks, namely the following: "Mafia organization", "corruption", "bunch of sellouts", "these judokas are just schemes", "these people have never been trusted", "history speaks for itself", "even religion", "an Israeli would rather lose a friend than a euro", "but weren't the Jews always like this?", "they were run from everywhere", "the rabbi is corrupt", "it goes from the rabbi to the owner of Chelsea and Altice", "they are what they have always been, bandits", "the very creation of Israel is based on the same imaginary assumption that they have the right to the land", "Israel has carte blanche to do what it wants in Palestine", "it always makes me kind of that a Portuguese community adopts a foreign, Israeli community as its name".

The defendants' report was issued on 22.11.2023 and, two months later, the Jews of Porto were presented as guilty of the housing crisis in the city, in a demonstration that took place in Praça Humberto Delgado, on January 28, 2024, where posters and slogans such as "Neither Haifa, nor Boavista", "We do not want to be tenants of Zionist murderers", and "No bombs in Palestine, no evictions in Porto".

Two days later, on January 30, the newspaper EsquerdaNet published the list with the names of Israeli Jews from Porto and their companies, something only seen in Germany during Nazism.

The international press and The Jerusalem Post of June 9, 2025 reported on an attempt to poison Israeli Jews at Portugal's Boom Festival.

The Jewish Community of Porto has already made it known, through its official newspaper, that, if the institution is the target of a terrorist attack, many Portuguese elites will have to fleed the country, since the responsibility will be imputed to the Portuguese political power that anchored itself and made use of reports such as the one targeted in this accusation and that put the whole society against the institution.

Such an abuse of power is not acceptable in a civilised society. If in any country in Europe other than Portugal a television station produced a report like the one on "Passports – Israel" mentioned above, this would be considered an outrage, and any director of information would have to explain himself or lose his job.

The program "Passports – Israel" was only possible in a country with a small Jewish community, and, even so, the system needed to isolate the Jewish Community of Porto, as if it were the bad Jewish community, that of the bad Jews, in fact falsely declared "not professed of the Jewish faith" by the political and media system, starting with the accused, in scandalous violation of religious freedom and freedom of conscience that has been forbidden to public and private institutions since the beginning of the Constitution of 1933.

In the USSR, the scheme was exactly the same to destroy the reputation of the important Jewish communities, of the Jews of merit and, at the same time, of the State of Israel and the Israeli population. Jewish communities or people without strength or talent were cherished and promoted in the press as a marvel, while the strong were massacred. This sinister game avoided accusations of anti-Semitism in the international press. There were always two or three pathetic Jews saying that everything was fine in the Soviet homeland.

In Portugal, why attack even lightly other Jewish communities that did not have synagogues and museums full of life, if they did not produce history films, etc.? Only the Jewish Community of Porto was attacked. All the others were presented as a "good example". This was done by the entire political and media system, so as not to give an air of anti-Semitism to the situation.

The Jewish Community of Porto claims that Portugal, the country that was an Empire in the time of the Jews and the true founder of Judeo-Christian Civilization, is today reduced to this misery, so that its assets belong as an inheritance to the World Jewish Agency. What happened in 1497 (Edict), 1618 (Inquisitorial Visitation), 1937 (Portuguese Dreyfus case), and 2022/2023 (Political and media power) will not be repeated.

The Jewish Community of Porto will continue to maintain the same nature of the Jewish State, which as is well known lives to produce, to create culture, to work, fearing no one and not taking passionate sides in wars between empires, but maintaining strategic relations with all superpowers – whether in the USA, in Russia, India or China – where it is not by chance that Jewish communities thrive (New York, Moscow, New Delhi, Hong Kong and Shanghai), without being targets of persecution and power plays, unlike what happens in other countries, often poor, small, poorly managed and with suicidal elites.