The Holocaust Museum in Porto opened its doors on April 5, 2021, marking the first Holocaust museum in the Iberian Peninsula. This institution is dedicated to educating the public about the horrors of the Nazi regime, preserving the memory of the millions of Jewish victims, and ensuring that history is not forgotten.
During World War II, Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime orchestrated the systematic genocide of 5.7 million Jews, including 500,000 children. This atrocity remains one of the most horrific crimes in human history, known as the Holocaust or Shoah.
The museum was originally scheduled to open on January 27, International Holocaust Remembrance Day, but its inauguration was postponed due to Portugal’s second national lockdown.
The Jewish Community of Porto (CJP), which developed the museum, designed it to portray Jewish life before the Holocaust, covering topics such as the rise of Nazism, Nazi expansion across Europe, the ghettos, refugees, concentration camps, forced labor, extermination, the Final Solution, death marches, liberation, post-war Jewish communities, and the founding of the State of Israel.
Holocaust Museum: A Place of Remembrance and Education
The Holocaust Museum in Porto features a faithful reproduction of Auschwitz concentration camp dormitories, a room of names, a flame memorial, a cinema, a conference room, a research center, and exhibits of photographs and videos that document the events leading up to and following the Holocaust. Similar to the Washington D.C. Holocaust Museum, it provides a deep and emotional experience for visitors.
The museum is managed by members of the Jewish Community of Porto, whose parents, grandparents, and relatives were Holocaust survivors or victims. It has established collaborations with Holocaust museums in Moscow, Hong Kong, the United States, and across Europe, ensuring that this memory is never erased.
Since 2013, the Jewish Community of Porto has contributed its refugee archives to the Washington D.C. Holocaust Museum, documenting the stories of Jewish refugees who passed through Porto during the war. Now, these archives have returned to Porto, including official documents, testimonies, letters, and hundreds of individual records.
Among the many stories told in the museum, visitors learn about Luísa Finkelstein, who remembers her relatives being shot after being forced to dig their own mass grave. The grandparents of Michael Rothwell were deported to Auschwitz in 1943, and Jonathan Lackman shares memories of his grandfather, who escaped from Treblinka, and his grandmother, who was rescued with typhus from Bergen-Belsen, the camp where Anne Frank died.
