During a demonstration against the rising cost of housing in the Portuguese city of Porto last Saturday, demonstrators brandished signs with antisemitic messages blaming Jews and Zionists for the economic crisis, according to Porto’s Jewish community.
The signs included antisemitic slogans and calls for the “cleansing the world of Jews.”
Other protesters drew inspiration from the Israel-Hamas war and anti-Israel narratives, instructing people “not to rent a house from Zionist murderers,” “We want a home to live in and Palestine is liberated,” and “Not Haifa and not Boavista, no to a Zionist capital!”
Boavista, a Porto neighborhood referenced by one of the signs, is the home of a synagogue and a growing number of Jewish residents.
“To march for hours through the streets of Porto in an organized demonstration, in the city with the country’s largest Jewish community and where decent and good Jewish businessmen live, and to carry anti-Semitic signs with messages whose call for violence is unquestionable, is not a private matter of one person or another but discrimination, incitement to violence and hatred, acts against which the police must act immediately,” Gabriel Senderowicz, president of the Porto Jewish Community, told Portuguese media.
“One sign compared the city of Haifa to the neighborhood of Boavista where the community’s synagogue is located. Another sign referred to Jewish homeowners, which constitutes a real attack against the Jewish and Israeli residents of the city. In a country of 10 million people with only 5,000 Jews, most of whom arrived in the country in the last decade, the Jewish minority is once again accused of violating the basic rights of the Portuguese, such as the right to affordable housing,” Senderowicz added.
The protest was also condemned by Israel’s ambassador to Portugal, Dor Shapira, who said that he “supports free speech, but these demonstrations are exploited to spread anti-Semitic, racist and hateful ideas. And that’s exactly what these signs say. It must be a red line that must not be crossed within the limits of freedom of expression.”
The average cost of a 3 bedroom rental apartment in Porto’s city center is EUR 1279 as of October 2023, according to Global Citizen Solutions, which is 27% cheaper than an apartment in Portugal’s capital city Lisbon. Portugal is also the cheapest country to reside in Western Europe, according to International Living.
Antisemitism plagues Porto's Jewish community
The protest came amid a growing climate of antisemitism. Only 3 days after Hamas launched it’s October 7 terrorist attack, which took the lives of over 1200 people, the synagogue of Porto’s Jewish community was vandalized with pro-Palestinian messages.
"The vandalizing of our synagogue shows how the Jews of the city are immediately accused by a group of people calling to ‘cleanse the world of Jews and the State of Israel between the river and the sea,’ even though they have no idea where the sea is and where the river is and what lies between them,” Senderowicz stated. “If this practice of incitement to violence and hatred against Portuguese Jews continues, we may reach a situation where there are those who adopt these ideas and could shoot innocent people in the streets out of blind hatred.”
On Friday, February 2, the Jewish community of Porto filed a criminal complaint for discrimination and incitement to hatred and violence against the protestors who carried those antisemitic signs and against Esquerda.net, the official newspaper of the Bloco de Esquerda party, affiliated with the Portuguese socialist government in recent years that ended its tenure recently due to a series of corruption scandals.
The community filed a complaint to the Attorney General demanding that charges be filed for inciting hatred and violence against Israeli and Jewish citizens and residents and against the newspaper Esquerda.net, criminal offenses punishable by Portuguese law with a prison sentence of between one to eight years.
After the demonstration, Esquerda.net published an article titled “Israeli capital increases real estate pressure in Porto”. The article presents the Jewish and Israeli residents of Porto in a negative light and details the names of Israeli entrepreneurs working in the field of real estate in Porto who arrived in Portugal upon receiving Portuguese citizenship as part of the "Spanish law" that passed in 2015 and until recently allowed Israeli citizens of Spanish or Portuguese origin to prove their connection to the country and subsequently be entitled to Portuguese citizenship.
The affair is stirring up the Portuguese media these days as many newspapers report on the complaint filed by the Jewish community in Porto against the inciting protesters personally and against the newspaper.