The Jewish Community of Oporto, Portugal on Monday declared the Jewish Agency for Israel as its legal heir, the culmination of a process which began in 2021.
The move means the agency will inherit all of the community’s assets should it one day be dissolved as an official entity.
Oporto’s Jews decided to take this step to ensure that its assets cannot be claimed by the state or other entities, according to a press release announcing the decision.
The community chose the Jewish Agency due to its importance in the foundation and development of the State of Israel and the global Jewish community, the release continues.
A monument to the agreement was inaugurated on Sunday, the European Day of Jewish Culture, at the Jewish Museum of Oporto, which regularly welcomes visitors from all over the world. The text on the monument calls on all Jewish communities in the Diaspora to take a similar step and legally safeguard their assets.
Michael Rothwell, the director of Oporto’s Jewish and Holocaust museums and a grandson of German Jews who lost everything they owned in Hitler’s Germany, explained the rationale.
“It is time for traditional Jewish optimism to look back and realize that the plundering of Jewish assets did not only happen in antiquity and the Middle Ages,” he said. “We only need to go back a few years, to the 20th century, to remember that not only the Ashkenazi communities of central and eastern Europe, but also many Sephardic communities, especially in Arab and Muslim countries, were stripped of their heritage and assets,” he added.
“No one knows what the world will be like in a few years. This is a very important matter that must be addressed as quickly as possible. We call on other communities to follow suit,” he said.
The most notable Jewish assets in Oporto are the monumental central synagogue, called Kadoorie Mekor Haim, which is the largest in the Iberian Peninsula; the Jewish Museum, located a few meters from the synagogue; and a cemetery called “Campo da Igualdade Isaac Aboab.”
Founded in 1923 by Captain Barros Basto, known as the “Portuguese Dreyfus” after being expelled from the army for helping to perform circumcisions for converts, the community has produced numerous films on the history of Jews in Portugal—including “1506 – The Genocide of Lisbon” and “1618,” the most internationally acclaimed Portuguese film in history.
The local Holocaust Museum each year welcomes more than 50,000 teenagers from schools around the country.
