Jewish community in Porto to produce a film about Lisbon massacre of 1506

The Jewish community of Porto has released the trailer for a full-length historical film about the massacre of the Jews of Lisbon that took place in the Portuguese capital in 1506.

The premiere of the film “1506,” which will be available for free viewing, takes place on April 19, 2024 – exactly 518 years since that horrific events occurred.

Public debates are planned to accompany the release of the movie in April and May in Miami, New York, Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, London, Paris, Marseille, Brussels, Porto and Lisbon. The film will be available in a variety of languages and platforms for online viewing.

More than 3,000 Jews were brutally murdered in the massacre between April 19 and 21, 1506. The fires into which the bodies were thrown reached the height of houses – even babies were thrown into the fire in the heart of the city, where for three days a brutal mass slaughter of the city’s Jewish residents took place.

Gabriel Senderowicz, president of the Porto Jewish community and a member of the European Jewish Association said: “To know the massacre of 1506 in Lisbon is to know the events of October 7, 2023 in Israel and the historic massacres perpetrated against the Jewish people throughout Europe. The only change is the weapons used.”

The Portuguese company LightBox was chosen to produce the film, and the script recreating the historical events, written in 2021, was based on in-depth research carried out at the Alberto Benveniste research center for Sephardic Studies at the University of Lisbon.

Over the past decade, the Porto Jewish community has been actively promoting Jewish culture, history and education, and among its notable achievements during this period is the feature film “1618,” which recounts the story of the Inquisition in the city and won the largest number of international awards for a Portuguese film.

Previously, the community produced the film “Sefarad,” which documents the story of the Jewish community in Porto over the past hundred years.

The Jewish community of Porto was only officially re-established in 1923 by Captain Barros Basto, known as the “Portuguese Dreyfus” after he was persecuted for his revival efforts some four centuries after the community had been destroyed by the Portuguese Inquisition.

Among the important projects led by the community over the past decade are the Jewish Museum in Porto and the Holocaust Museum, which in the past two years have hosted more than 100,000 schoolchildren, constituting 10% of all schoolchildren in Portugal.