The Jewish Community of Oporto has announced the appointment of the Jewish Agency for Israel (JAFI) as its legal heir, a process which began in 2021.
The action means JAFI would inherit all of the community’s assets should it one day be dissolved as an official entity. The Jewish Community of Oporto owns significant assets, including synagogues, museums, libraries, cinema, restaurants and art gallery.
The Jewish Agency was chosen as the heir to the community’s assets due to its importance in the foundation and development of the State of Israel and the global Jewish community, a spokesperson said.
The community made the decision four years ago to ensure that its assets can not be claimed by the state or other entities as happened during the Holocaust, when many Jewish community assets were stolen or nationalized, and when Jews were expelled and/or forced to flee Middle Eastern and North African Arab nations.
A monument to this agreement was inaugurated Sunday on the European Day of Jewish Culture at the Jewish Museum of Oporto, which regularly welcomes worldwide visitors. The text on the monument calls on all Jewish communities in the diaspora to take a similar step and legally safeguard who will inherit their assets.
Michael Rothwell, the director of Porto’s Jewish and Holocaust museums, and a grandson of German Jews who lost everything they owned in Hitler’s Germany explained the rationale.
“It is time for traditional Jewish optimism to look back and realize that the plundering of Jewish assets did not only happen in antiquity and the Middle Ages,” Rothwell said. “We only need to go back a few years, to the 20th century, to remember that not only the Ashkenazi communities of central and eastern Europe, but also many Sephardic communities, especially in Arab and Muslim countries, were stripped of their heritage and assets.”
“No one knows what the world will be like in a few years. This is a very important matter that must be addressed as quickly as possible. We call on other communities to follow suit.”
