Museu Judaico do Porto, Porto

Opened in 2019, Porto’s Jewish Museum uses objects, film and family history to confront antisemitism rather than treating Jewish life as a remote past. It was created by the Porto Jewish Community together with B’nai B’rith International, and it faces the synagogue on Rua de Guerra Junqueiro. In the garden, a stone memorial recalls Isaac Aboab, Porto’s leading rabbi of the fifteenth century.

He arrived here after the expulsion from Spain, lived out his final years in Porto, and Abraham Zacuto—mathematician and astronomer—buried him. Beyond that, the museum preserves an Inquisition prisoner cart made for the film 1618. At the building entrance, a Hebrew inscription expresses a reciprocal duty: Portuguese people and Jews should aid one another wherever they meet.

Inside, Torah scrolls, a model of Jerusalem’s Temple, Talmud volumes, Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah, a shofar and a gold menorah introduce a journey from Abraham through exile and the Jewish presence in Iberia. Later galleries trace expulsion, Inquisition, migration, the return of Sephardic families in the nineteenth century, and the arrival of Ashkenazi Jews from eastern Europe around the First World War. The final rooms connect that long history with the community’s cultural and religious life today.