“The national Jewish community today is stronger than it was ten years ago in numerical, religious, and cultural terms, with new synagogues, museums, historical films, restaurants, art galleries, and music choirs,” stated the Jewish Community of Porto (CIP) in a response to Agência Lusa.
As the government announced changes to the nationality law, blocking citizenship for descendants of Sephardic Jews, CIP President Gabriel Senderowicz remarked that the “law was of national interest.”
“The Portuguese state is sovereign today, as it was a decade ago,” he emphasized, recalling that Sephardic Jews also played a role in the national building of Portugal, as seen with Yaish ben Yahia (finance minister of King Afonso Henriques), contributing to Portugal becoming an “economic, scientific, and military empire.”
The search for Jewish heritage has been very active, added Senderowicz, highlighting that the “largest Chabad Center in Europe is located in Portugal, in honor of Rabbi Baruch Portugali,” and citing the Portuguese film 1618, produced by the Porto community, as examples of this dynamism.
“The right to nationality has existed since 1981 for descendants of Portuguese-origin communities,” and therefore, “for Jews as well, although it was largely unknown among Jewish communities in general,” said the CIP leader.
However, the publication in 2015 of the law for Sephardic Jews sought to correct history, as “it was well known that there was a large Jewish population of Portuguese origin, especially in Israel, where approximately one million Jews of Moroccan descent, or rather, from traditional Sephardic families of Morocco, live.”
The CIP official stressed that the Lusitanian-Israelis involved in the hostage crisis in Gaza showed the “profile of those holding Portuguese nationality,” all “descendants of traditional Sephardic families from the Mediterranean and the former Ottoman Empire.”
“This has always been the basic profile of those certified by the Porto community,” noted Senderowicz.
According to data released by the Institute of Registries and Notaries (IRN) earlier this week, as of June 30, over half a million processes (515,334) were under review, of which 31% were naturalization requests by descendants of Portuguese Sephardic Jews.
In the past five years, the IRN received over 1.5 million requests, with 2022 seeing 367,348 nationality processes, of which 124,663 were under the legislation for descendants of Portuguese Sephardic Jews.
On Friday, Presidency Minister António Leitão Amaro presented amendments to the nationality law, including the removal of the clause that allowed citizenship to descendants of Sephardic Jews.
The leftist opposition has criticized the law’s abuses, recalling various investigations into corruption and irregularities, including the granting of citizenship to Russian oligarchs, such as Roman Abramovich.
