Holocaust Museum in the city of Porto

The holocaust museum is scheduled to open on April 5, 2021, which will be the first Holocaust Museum in the Iberian Peninsula, and with free entry until the end of May.

During World War II, Adolf Hitler’s German Nazi regime was responsible for the barbaric murder of 5.7 million Jews, half a million of whom were children, perhaps the most shocking genocide in human history.

An opening that has been postponed since January 27, what is the International Day of Remembrance for the Victims of the Holocaust, an opening that has been postponed due to the beginning of the second confinement in Portugal.

The Jewish Community of Porto (CJP), the entity responsible for the birth of this museum, explains that it will be a space that “portrays Jewish life before the Holocaust, Nazism, the Nazi expansion in Europe, the ghettos, the refugees, the different camps. concentration, work and extermination, the Final Solution, the death marches, liberation, the postwar Jewish population, the founding of the State of Israel ”.

In an authentic reproduction of the dormitories of the Auschwitz concentration camp, as well as a room full of names, a flame memorial, cinema, conference room, study center, corridors with the complete narrative and, in the image of the Washington Museum, photographs and screens showing films from this troubled period of history, with during and after the tragedy.

The Museum will be tutored by members of the Jewish Community of Porto, members whose parents, grandparents and family members were victims of the Holocaust, the Holocaust Museum in Porto developing partnerships with other Holocaust museums, as well as in Moscow, Hong Kong, United States and others in Europe, contributing to “a memory that cannot be erased”.

Partnerships between museums that greatly benefit everyone, already in 2013, the Jewish Community of Porto (CJP) sent all its files regarding refugees who passed through the city of Porto to the Washington Holocaust Museum, files that have now returned, including documents officers, testimonies, letters and hundreds of individual files.

Just like the name of Luísa Finkelstein, who recalls the family members shot in the museum’s presentation video after being forced to dig a mass grave, or that of Michael Rothwell’s grandparents, who in 1943 were “transported like cattle” to the countryside. extermination of Auschwitz, where they were separated, subjected to abuse and, finally, murdered. “My grandparents were good German patriots, my great-uncles really gave their lives for their country in the First World War, they loved a country that was also theirs,” she says.

Jonathan Lackman also shares memories: “My grandfather fled Treblinka and my grandmother was rescued with typhus from the Bergen-Belsen camp in northern Germany, where Anne Frank died. I will always tell their story”

“The museum was designed to receive all audiences. However, the teaching of the Holocaust must always begin with the youngest”, reiterates Hugo Vaz, curator of the museum and advisor to the management of the CIP / CJP in matters of culture, who sees museum a “starting point” for students’ awareness and awareness of issues related to the Holocaust.

The difficult construction of the Holocaust Museum in Porto had an important donation from a Portuguese Sephardic family in Southeast Asia, a family that had been the victim of a Japanese concentration camp during World War II ”, according to information from the CJP.

In the museum are also exposed two Sifrei Torah (Torah scrolls) offered to the synagogue in Porto by refugees, come and see this fantastic tour in Portugal.