Porto gifts visitor books to Yad Vashem

The new Holocaust Museum of Porto in Portugal is to give its visitors’ books to Israel’s Holocaust museum Yad Vashem, because they show so much support for the Jewish state.

Despite it only having opened to the public this April, there have already been 22,000 visitors, and local Jewish community member Gabriela Cantergi said “thousands” of comments in support of Israel had touched everyone.

“From 22,000 people, there isn’t a single criticism of Israel,” said Cantergi. “There is a lot of praise, which leads us to conclude that a large part of European [anti-Israel] politics and media have not achieved the desired results.”

Around 70 percent of the museum’s visitors are young people, and around four-fifths of the local Jewish population are descended from Jews expelled from north African countries in the past century.

The Porto museum explores Jewish life before the Holocaust, as well as Nazism, Nazi expansion in Europe, the ghettoes and Jewish refugees, plus the camps, death marches, and liberation. It includes a reproduction of the dorms at Auschwitz, a names room, a flame memorial, cinema, conference room and study centre.