Porto’s Jewish community unveils memorial to 842 local victims of Portuguese Inquisition
The victims ranged in age from 10 to 110 and were identified using newly digitized records
The victims ranged in age from 10 to 110 and were identified using newly digitized records
Few actually choose to live there
Aristides de Sousa Mendes was punished by Portugal for rescuing 10,000 Jews. But their descendants, and Israel, honor his memory
Louisa May Alcott was often told as a child that her dark hair and dark eyes came from her Sephardic Jewish ancestry. Her mother, Abigail May Alcott, who had similar coloring, had learned this from her father, Joseph May, a late 18th-century Boston businessman whose Portuguese Jewish ancestors immigrated to Sussex, England, just before 1500….
(JTA) — Portugal has approved about a third of approximately 33,000 applications for citizenship under its 2015 law for descendants of Sephardic Jews, according to official data. Applications based on the 2015 law, primarily from Israel, Turkey, Brazil and Venezuela, are behind a 10-percent increase in applications in 2018, which saw 41,324 such requests in…
(JTA) — A Portugal government committee has approved the creation of a Memorial Day for the Victims of the Inquisition. The inquisition was formally established in Portugal in 1536. The date of the memorial day will be held on or around March 31, the official end of the Inquisition in 1821. Reconectar, the movement to…
We don’t know how exactly many Jews were forced out of Spain by Ferdinand and Isabella’s cruel Edict of Expulsion in 1492, but conservative estimates put the number of refugees somewhere between 100,000 and 160,000. We climbed the northern mountains to escape into Navarre, and from there we took to the sea, hoping to find…
(JTA) — Nearly 1,800 descendants of Sephardic Jews acquired the Portuguese nationality in 2017 under a law enacted two years earlier, with another 12,000 still in the application process, officials in Lisbon said. The tally for last year is six times higher than the total for 2016, during which the application of the law hit…