Portugal’s new IHRA head visits Porto Holocaust Museum

Ambassador Maria de Fátima Velez de Andrade Mendes, Portugal’s new head of delegation to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), visited the Holocaust Museum of Porto on Thursday 24 September. 

The centre teaches around 50,000 Portuguese schoolchildren each year about the Shoah and since its opening in 2021, has hosted nearly 30% of the country’s teenage population.

Ambassador Mendes said: “It is everyone’s duty to contribute so that the Holocaust and the causes that gave rise to it are never forgotten again. I will do everything in my power to honor Portugal’s role as a signatory to the IHRA.”

Managed by the Jewish Community of Porto, including by descendants of Holocaust victims, the museum offers schools free visits and often helps cover transport costs for classes that could not otherwise attend.

Its collection includes 426 personal files and transit documents tracing Jewish refugees who passed through Porto in 1940 and 1941 while fleeing Nazi-occupied Europe.

Gabriel Senderowicz, president of the Jewish Community of Porto said the museum “is unique in the world as the names of the benefactors displayed on the museum’s final panel are the children or grandchildren of the donors—or, ultimately, the deceased ancestors themselves, many of them from Israel.”

“Building on this momentum,” he added, “the museum is now calling on more Jewish benefactors to contribute small donations in their children’s names, as we wish to expand this work until the entire new generation of Portuguese children has visited the museum and engaged with the Jewish community.”

The museum presents the history of the Holocaust through archival records, artifacts and film, including a reproduction of an Auschwitz barracks and a memorial room bearing victims’ names. It also documents the refugees’ time in Porto and preserves identification records and religious texts they left behind.

It was founded by the Jewish community of Porto in partnership with Holocaust museums in Jerusalem, Washington, Moscow and Hong Kong and places emphasis on school visits and teacher training.

Mendes’s visit comes as she works to deepen Portugal’s involvement in the IHRA, strengthen academic and institutional ties, and support efforts against contemporary antisemitism, Holocaust denial and distortion online.

It also offers an opportunity to strengthen cooperation between the Portuguese government and the museum. In Porto, Fernando Pessoa University became the first university in the country to formally adopt the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism.

In 2025, the Portuguese government formally recognised the cultural and educational importance of the Jewish Community of Porto’s work, including the Holocaust museum.