Ambassador Maria de Fátima Velez de Andrade Mendes, Portugal’s new head of delegation to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), visited the Holocaust Museum of Porto.
The visit gave Portugal’s IHRA head of delegation an opportunity to draw on the Holocaust Museum of Porto’s educational expertise and the insights of those who teach around 50,000 Portuguese schoolchildren each year about the Holocaust. Since opening in 2021, it has hosted nearly 30% of the country’s teenage population.
“It is everyone’s duty to contribute so that the Holocaust and the causes that gave rise to it are never forgotten again,” Mendes said. “I will do everything in my power to honor Portugal’s role as a signatory to the IHRA.”
Managed by the Jewish Community of Porto, including by descendants of Holocaust victims, the museum offers schools free visits and often helps cover transport costs for classes that could not otherwise attend. Its collection includes 426 personal files and transit documents tracing Jewish refugees who passed through Porto in 1940 and 1941 while fleeing Nazi-occupied Europe.
The museum’s benefactors’ panel reflects a bond between Jewish families in Israel and Holocaust education in Portugal. Supporters who donate €250 or more often ask for their children’s or young relatives’ names to appear instead of their own. As a result, some of the names helping sustain the museum’s work belong to Israeli children only 2 or 3 years old.
One Israeli visitor, moved by the sight of Portuguese school groups touring the museum, donated €1,000 and asked that his four young relatives be recognized in his place. Through this approach to philanthropy, Jewish families are giving the next generation a personal connection to the work of educating another country’s next generation about the Holocaust.
“The Holocaust Museum of Porto is unique in the world as the names of the benefactors displayed on the museum’s final panel are the children or grandchildren of the donors—or, ultimately, the deceased ancestors themselves, many of them from Israel,” said Gabriel Senderowicz, president of the Jewish Community of Porto. “Building on this momentum, the museum is now calling on more Jewish benefactors to contribute small donations in their children’s names, as we wish to expand this work until the entire new generation of Portuguese children has visited the museum and engaged with the Jewish community.”
The museum presents the history of the Holocaust through archival records, artifacts and film, including a reproduction of an Auschwitz barracks and a memorial room bearing victims’ names. It also documents the refugees’ time in Porto and preserves identification records and religious texts they left behind. Founded by the Jewish Community of Porto in partnership with Holocaust museums in Jerusalem, Washington, Moscow and Hong Kong, it places particular emphasis on school visits and teacher training.
Mendes’s visit comes as she works to deepen Portugal’s involvement in the IHRA, strengthen academic and institutional ties and support efforts against contemporary antisemitism, Holocaust denial and distortion online. It also offers an opportunity to strengthen cooperation between the Portuguese government and the museum. In Porto, Fernando Pessoa University became the first university in Portugal to formally adopt the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism.
In 2025, the Portuguese government formally recognized the cultural and educational importance of the Jewish Community of Porto’s work, including the Holocaust museum. For the community, the next goal is clear: to make a museum visit possible for every new generation of Portuguese students.
