Setting an example and a precedent, the Jewish Community of Oporto has officially announced that the Jewish Agency for Israel is its legal heir. This process began in 2021, and it would mean that JAFI would inherit all of the community’s assets should it one day be dissolved as an official entity.

The Oporto Community decided to take this significant step which began four years ago, to ensure that its assets can not be claimed by the state or other entities, as with many communal assets stolen or nationalized during the Twentieth Century during the Holocaust or the plundering of Jewish assets in the Middle East and North Africa as the Jews were expelled or forced to flee.

A monument to this agreement was inaugurated yesterday on the European Day of Jewish Culture at the Jewish Museum of Oporto, which regularly welcomes visitors worldwide. The text on the monument calls on all Jewish communities in the diaspora to take a similar step and legally safeguard who will inherit their assets.

Michael Rothwell, the director of Porto’s Jewish and Holocaust museums and a grandson of German Jews who lost everything they owned in Hitler’s Germany, explained the rationale.

“It is time for traditional Jewish optimism to look back and realize that the plundering of Jewish assets did not only happen in antiquity and the Middle Ages,” Rothwell said. “We only need to go back a few years, to the 20th century, to remember that not only the Ashkenazi communities of central and eastern Europe but also many Sephardic communities, especially in Arab and Muslim countries, were stripped of their heritage and assets.”

“No one knows what the world will be like in a few years. This is a very important matter that must be addressed as quickly as possible. We call on other communities to follow suit.”

In recent years, the Jewish Community of Oporto has become one of the most noteworthy Jewish communities around the world and declared JAFI to be heir to its significant assets, including synagogues, museums, libraries, cinema, restaurants and art gallery.

The most notable Jewish assets in Oporto are the monumental central synagogue, called Kadoorie Mekor Haim, which is the largest in the Iberian Peninsula, the Jewish Museum, located a few meters from the synagogue, and a cemetery called “Campo da Igualdade Isaac Aboab”.

Founded in 1923 by Captain Barros Basto, known by the nickname “Portuguese Dreyfus” after being expelled from the army for helping to perform circumcisions for converts, the community has produced numerous films on the history of Jews in Portugal – including “1506 – The Genocide of Lisbon” and “1618”, the most internationally acclaimed Portuguese film in history, and also has a Holocaust Museum that, each year, welcomes more than 50,000 teenagers from schools around the country.

The Jewish Agency was chosen as the heir to the Jewish community of Porto due to its importance in the foundation and development of the State of Israel and the global Jewish community.

Founded in 1929 and currently based in Jerusalem, the Jewish Agency is the largest Jewish NGO in the world and is funded by the Keren Hayesod, major Jewish communities, federations, foundations and donors from Israel and around the world. In 2008, the Jewish Agency won the Israel Prize for its historical contribution to Israel and to the Jewish world.