Porto Jewish community asks Europe to probe antisemitism in Portugal

The Jewish Community of Porto (CIP/CJP) has called on the European Commission to instigate an impartial international investigation into “an antisemitic action that took place in Portugal using robbers, murderers and convicts who intended to defame the country’s strongest Jewish community, destroy Jewish leadership, halt the influx of Israeli citizens and end the law that granted Portuguese citizenship to Jews of Portuguese origin,” said Gabriel Senderowicz, Porto Jewish community’s president.

The letter was sent to the European Commission's coordinator on combating antisemitism and fostering Jewish life, Katharina von Schnurbein.

“The reasons for the request relate to the need to investigate who ordered the March 2022 police action against the community and who were the ‘robbers, murderers and convicts’ who tried to incriminate Jews from Porto,” Senderowicz said, adding that “there is also a need to safeguard the honor of the Portuguese nation’s distinct figures, who will certainly be the first to be interested in an independent investigation.”

Senderowicz added that “in September 2022, the [Portuguese] High Court said that criminal indictments against the community were ‘based on nothing,’ something the Porto police had already stated in 2021.”

Accusations of antisemitism labeled at Portuguese police

Last July, Portuguese police searched the home of the curator of the Jewish Museum in Porto as well as the offices of several Portuguese lawyers who work with the Jewish community in handling citizenship applications.

This came a few weeks after the Porto Jewish community submitted its response to the Portuguese parliament regarding the state’s intention to abolish the “Spanish Law,” and accused Portugal of antisemitism and of persecuting Jews. The lawyers, according to the Jewish community, were given a list of 20 wealthy Jews who have received Portuguese citizenship since the law came into effect in 2015, including businessmen Lev Leviev, Roman Abramovich, God Nisanov, Andrei Rappoport, Sir Michael Kadoorie and others.

In the letter to the European Commission, Senderowicz explained that “police from Lisbon raided the synagogue and the Jewish Museum and arrested the rabbi on the basis of anonymous denunciations that attributed to him acts of corruption by two people he does not know [one certified by the Jewish community of Lisbon, the other by the community of origin] accusing him of corrupting registry offices that he never visited.

“At the same time, ‘suitcases of money’ were searched for at the home of the vice president; a construction company of a community collaborator was suspected of issuing certifications of Sephardi origin, and an official statement from the authorities spread the news that the community was also indicted for drug trafficking.”

A community council member for legal affairs, attorney David Garrett, added in a press release on behalf of the Porto Jewish community that the European Commission investigation is necessary: “If the anonymous, slanderous complaints were not made by convicts at the request of state agents; if the attempt to eliminate the first signer of a petition to the parliament was authored by someone who chose his target at random; if there is no relationship between the professional burglars who stole the server from a community lawyer [in Porto] and the computers of the president of SIRESP [in Lisbon] – then everything was nothing more than a miraculous coincidence and the community should not remain alarmed,” Garrett said.

He added that “if, on the contrary, the investigation concludes that state agents used criminals and all the press against a religious and cultural organization [the Jewish Community of Porto], then we can say that they wanted mostly to destroy a nascent Jewish elite and that the aim was not merely to initiate proceedings against suspects for the practice of illegalities. Against these, legal means of obtaining evidence would be used and the police would not be used as an instrument, much less whether they would use burglars, murderers and manufacturers of anonymous complaints.”

Vivian Groisman, who is responsible for the Sephardi archive of the Porto Jewish community and, in March, saw a large number of police officers eager to apprehend everything, was quoted as saying that she witnessed “a scene that broke my desire to live in Portugal. An international investigation must be carried out for the security of our community,” Groisman said.

She added, “For the sake of transparency, it is also in the interests of unsullied people such as the former minister of justice, who produced a regulation that killed the Sephardic Law of Return in practical terms, collected anonymous complaints and had them investigated by entities whose leaders she appointed.” The minister also “fired the director of SIRESP, from whose home the computers were stolen three days later – and the former foreign minister who, for a ‘Palestinian cause,’ headed the destruction of the Sephardic Law of Return, reduced the positive effects of the law on some visits by tourists, and premonitorily said in parliament in 2020 that if the house did not act, public opinion would act.”j