The Jewish Community of Oporto published on Sunday the following video titled “How to Destroy a Jewish Community”:
The narrator says:
“So, you don’t like traditional Jews, Jewish success and Israel? You don’t like packed synagogues and the Jewish community teaching people about the Holocaust. The State is at your mercy and you wish to destroy it all? Easy! Get someone to produce anonymous letters with false denunciations of corruption. Get some friendly journalists to publish these denunciations. Get your police to investigate that fictional corruption. Let them invade synagogues and the homes of leaders. Let them seize everything they find. You might be lucky and there’ll be something suspicious. But if nothing is found, don’t worry. Time is on your side. It will take years for the investigation to be completed. No one will bother you. The own Jewish world will be paralyzed. The words corruption and police cause people to freeze. You are the greatest, the world is at your feet. BUT have you really won? Or will you face Jewish resilience? You’re the corrupter of State, the corrupter of Civilization.”
In March, the Jewish Community of Oporto urged Portuguese President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa to issue a public apology for what it described as a “Soviet-style” antisemitic campaign against it by government and law enforcement authorities.
In a letter to de Sousa, which can be read in full here, Jewish Community of Oporto President Gabriel Senderowicz wrote, “On 11 March 2022, the Oporto Synagogue, the Jewish Museum, and the houses of community leaders were unlawfully invaded by a large number of police officers, based on anonymous denunciations by criminals.”
“The heads of the Public Prosecutor’s Office and the Judiciary Police, shamefully instrumentalized the accusations, for political purposes, and told the world they were investigating possible crimes of active corruption, influence-trafficking, tax fraud, money laundering, forgery of documents and others,” he added.
Senderowicz further asserted, “The accusations against the community were technically impossible and the authorities knew they had no evidence of such charges.”
Last September, he noted, a Court of Appeals ruled that the investigations were “based on nothing.”
As a result of the case, Senderowicz stated, the Jewish Community of Oporto had suffered “wrongs and damages” that were “irreparable and can never be compensated.”
A video detailing the plight faced by the Jewish Community of Oporto over the past year can be viewed below:
