B’nai B’rith International Portugal and the International Observatory of Human Rights held an event earlier this week to remember the kindness of a nun who recited kaddish for a Jewish man when no one else would, and honored the Bishop of Oporto, D. Manuel Linda, to remember individual acts of kindness by Catholics in Portugal towards Jews.
In 1982, Oporto’s Jewish community was reduced to around 20 very divided Jews. When German refugee Emil Oppenheim died, he was not given a proper funeral, which upset two Catholic nuns who had cared for him during the last years of his life.
With the assistance of the German Consulate, a meeting was arranged at the cemetery between the nuns and a Jew from the community, also originally German, Rudolf Lemchen, who brought a prayerbook (siddur) with him. After Lemchen had made the kaddish alone, one of the nuns took the siddur and recited it herself.
The episode was remembered in a short film that the Jewish Community of Oporto produced, entitled “The Nun’s Kaddish.”
At the remembrance event, which took place at the headquarters of B’nai B’rith Portugal, the speakers remembered individual Catholic acts of kindness throughout history, even during times of persecution against the Jewish community, and paid tribute to the bishop for his role in defending human rights in general and Jewish rights in particular. The two groups recognized Bishop Linda as “an ambassador of peace.”
“It is my privilege to express my friendship with the Portuguese Jewish community,” the bishop said. “I always learn much from them.”
Gabriela Cantergi, president of B’nai B’rith International Portugal, said, “Jewish human rights are often denied in a world that targets Jews and the only Jewish state and associates them with deeply negative connotations, ignoring all the good Jews and Israel have done.
“That is why we must recognize, remember and thank those who stand with the Jewish people and defend our human rights,” she said. “Our relationship with the Catholic Church has not been easy historically, but we must remember those individuals who did good for individual Jews, like the nun and the bishop.”
“We dare not ignore the growth of discrimination against Jews, because as we have seen throughout history, antisemitism is a good barometer for the sickness of our societies, and what starts with Jews never ends with them,” said Luis Andrade, president of the International Observatory of Human Rights.
In 2023, B’nai B’rith International Portugal and the International Observatory of Human Rights posthumously honored former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres and the Lubavitcher Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson and recognized that both had become “a reference point for the good of humanity.”
