Hundreds of schoolchildren from Portugal commemorate Kristallnacht
Students from across the country visited the Holocaust Museum in Porto to remember the series of pogroms in Germany on 9 November 1938
Five hundred students from across the country today commemorated Kristallnacht at The Holocaust Museum of the Jewish community in Porto, Portugal.
A memorial flame for the victims of ‘Night of Broken Glass’ was lit in a moving ceremony and the director of the museum, Dr. Michael Rothwell, told those present about his grandfather’s shoe store in Germany whose windows were smashed on that traumatic night.
Sebastião Feyo, president of the Porto municipal assembly said: “Tragedies like Kristallnacht remind us of the duty of political, religious or community leaders in maintaining peace and harmony in society. From the loss of civic rights in their own land to the Holocaust, Jews were victims of persecution and hatred, but also of indifference and neglect”.
Michael Rothwell, the director of the Holocaust and the Jewish museums in Porto talked to the visiting teenagers and said that “in many countries, Jews are perceived as rich and plutocrats with their own state in Israel which unfortunately the detractors also hate. Generations after the end of the Holocaust, anti-Judaism and anti-Israelism are worryingly on the rise, in Europe and beyond”.
The Holocaust Museum of Porto, led by members of the Jewish community, is the only one operating on the Iberian Peninsula. In the last two years, an estimated 100 thousand school students have visited, corresponding to about 10% of the total teenage population of Portugal.
Rothwell also announced that the Jewish community of Porto is now producing a film on the 1506 genocide in Lisbon, adding: “To know the 1506 massacre in Lisbon is to know the 7 October 2023 massacre in Israel and the historic genocides of Jews all over Europe. All it took was a spark for ancient myths to cause a catastrophe. The bonfires with burning bodies were as high as the houses. Even babies were thrown onto the flames in a city filled with butchered bodies, where heads were borne aloft on the tips of lances.”
On October 11 2023, Porto’s Kadoorie Mekor Haim Ssynagogue was vandalized with black graffiti scrawled over its white gate, reading “End Israel Apartheid” and “Free Palestine”.
The largest synagogue on the Iberian Peninsula and among the largest in Europe, Kadoorie serves a community of about 1,500 Porto Jews, including many with familial ties to Israel and the Holocaust.
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