Porto Jewish community to produce film on children kidnapped during inquisition

The Jewish community of Porto announced last week that its representatives would be producing a film highlighting the lives of 2,000 Jewish children who were kidnapped from their families in Portugal in 1493.

The film titled "The 2,000 Exiled Jewish Children," which is set to premiere by the end of 2024, recounts the story of children who were taken from their homes and exiled to the island of Sao Tome on the African coast. Following a year on the island, only 600 of them survived.  

The event was organized by the Jewish community on the occasion of the anniversary of the Portuguese inquisition, the community noted.

The event was attended by some 1,000 children who visited the Porto Jewish Museum alongside the Holocaust Museum. 

The announcement follows the community's release in April of the film "1506-The Lisbon Genocide" which narrates the three-day-massacre of the Jews of Lisbon in 1506. 

Identifying and combating antisemitism

Regarding the story of the 2,000 children, the director of the Porto Jewish Museum, Michael Rothwell, said, “This dark episode demonstrates the depths that many went to in order to try and defeat and destroy our people."

“We are once again living in a dark time when the Jewish people are under attack around the world. That is why education is so important, especially targeting young schoolchildren. They must be taught tolerance and acceptance and how to identify and combat antisemitism,” he added.

President of the Porto Jewish community, Gabriel Senderowicz, stated, “Today, children react more to visual media, so it is vital to create tools that depict with historical accuracy the pain and suffering Jews went through in the past so they can recognize it in the present." 

Addressing the October 7 massacre, Senderowicz noted, "It is important to show the context of current antisemitism as a continuation of what has gone before. Sadly, there is nothing new under the sun, and even today, Jewish children were hunted and kidnapped as we saw in the south of Israel on October 7.”