(JTA) — Five years ago, this city’s tiny Jewish community was so strapped for cash it couldn’t afford to fix the deep cracks in its synagogue’s moldy ceiling. The Jewish Community of Porto was also too poor to hire a full-time rabbi because of its small size (50 members) and the paucity of donors in…
PORTO, Portugal — Some 300 Jews from eight countries, including the chief rabbi of Turkey, celebrated the introduction of a new Torah scroll into Portugual’s Kadoorie Synagogue. The celebration on Jan. 29 in Porto, Portugal’s second largest city, in what is said to be the largest synagogue in the Iberian Peninsula, was the main event…
Maria de Belem, a presidential candidate in Portugal, pledged her support for a legislative initiative to reinstate posthumously an army captain who was persecuted for promoting Judaism. The initiative to reinstate Arthur Carlos de Barros Basto, who died in 1961, was restarted by the Jewish Community of Porto last week. The community sent on Oct….
Officials in Lisbon approved the naturalization of a Panamanian national who applied for a Portuguese passport under recent legislation benefiting descendants of Sephardic Jews. Alfonso Paredes is the first applicant to obtain Portuguese nationality since new regulations for the naturalization of Sephardic Jews went into effect in March, according to the Jewish Community of Porto,…
The Jewish Community of Porto in northern Portugal quashed a bill designed to reinstate an army captain who had been fired and libeled because of his outreach to descendants of Jews. The lawmakers who submitted the bill to rehabilitate Arthur Carlos Barros Basto withdrew it earlier this month ahead of a vote at the National…
The Jewish community of Porto opened a museum in the northern Portuguese city. In the opening of the Jewish Museum of Porto on May 24, the community welcomed the public to a three-room display that attempts to tell the story of 900 years of Jewish presence in the region, Michael Rothwell, the community’s spokesperson, told…
Israel and Portugal honored in Lisbon a deceased priest who last year first received recognition for saving dozens of Jews during the Holocaust. A nephew of Joaquim Carreira, a Catholic priest from Portugal, last week received a medal from Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust museum in Jerusalem in recognition of his late uncle’s actions. Separately, Portugal’s…
Dozens of Portuguese Jews were set to convene on an island in the Atlantic Ocean for the rededication of the country’s oldest intact synagogue. Thursday’s rededication ceremony at the Sahar Hassamain synagogue on Sao Miguel, located 900 miles west of Lisbon, follows renovations that began last year. The repairs cost hundreds of thousands of dollars,…
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