The rabbi of Porto urged the Catholic Church
of Portugal to block a local priest’s plan to open a museum
commemorating Jewish presence in the city.
Rabbi
Daniel Litvak made the appeal in a letter this week to the Patriarchate
of Lisbon against a plan promoted by Father Agostinho Jardim Moreira to
open The Center for Jewish Memory.
“It would be improper and a travesty for a
Catholic priest to try to distort history and possibly benefit
financially from a museum in memory of the very people whom the church
expelled,” Litvak told JTA on Tuesday.
Porto, which has a Jewish community of several
dozen, used to have tens of thousands of Jews before their 16th century
expulsion and forced conversion into Christianity.
Moreira wants to open the museum inside a building that once belonged to Jewish owners before its confiscation, Litvak said.
“Porto has a Jewish community with Jews from
14 nations and if anyone should be running a museum, it should be that
community,” he said.
But Michael Freund, chairman of Shavei Israel —
an Israeli NGO that runs a Jewish heritage center in Trancoso near
Porto as part of its outreach to former Jews — offered a passionate
defense of Moreira and condemned Litvak’s letter.
Moreira’s project “is a welcome and
long-overdue initiative, and it has won the support of Portuguese
Jewry,” Freund said, adding it would help raise awareness to that
community’s endurance and revival despite persecution.
“It is disgraceful that Daniel Litvak has
taken the inexcusable step of criticizing Father Moreira and this
project, and I think his criticism is completely without merit,” Freund
told JTA.
Moreira told the Lusa news agency that his
plan was backed by the Jewish community of Lisbon, the country’s largest
with a few hundred members, and of Belmonte.
Lisbon’s Jewish community declined to comment
on Litvak’s letter. However, a prominent member of the community spoke
to JTA on condition of anonymity.
“We believe that every initiative which
relates to religious dialogue should be encouraged,” the community
member said, “and that attitudes such as the ones taken by the Porto
community are negative and conducive to creating anti-Semitism.”