Jewish Museum opens in Portugal

The Jewish community in Porto, in northern Portugal, has opened  a museum  in the grand Kadoorie Mekor Chaim Synagogue there.

The museum opened to the public on May 24, the anniversary of last year’s deadly terror attack on the Jewish Museum in Brussels, but local media report that the official opening ceremony will take place June 28.

The new museum is housed in three rooms on the first floor of the synagogue, with one of the rooms arranged to resemble a Sephardic yeshiva.

The exhibit expands a smaller display of material on the history of the modern Jewish community in Porto which already was on show. Its exhibits, writes JTA,  includes “a replica of an inscription on the foundation stone of a synagogue that opened in 1380 in Porto and a list of 842 people tortured by the Portuguese Inquisition” in the 15th and 16th centuries.

The Kadoorie  Synagogue, the largest active synagogue in Iberia, was founded in the 1920s when Porto was the center of a modest Jewish cultural revival under the leadership of an army captain, Arturo Carlos de Barros Bastos, who felt it was his mission to reach out to Conversos and bring them back to Judaism.

The synagogue was built with the financial backing of Lord Kadoorie of Hong Kong in honor of his wife and was was intended as a home for Portuguese Conversos.

Click to read the JTA story