PORTO, Portugal — Dozens of European Jewish community leaders convened in the Portuguese city of Porto on Monday for a conference on communal strategies, including lessons from how the city’s local Jews have attracted hundreds of new congregants.
“The leaders of the Jewish community of Porto can be a great example of how just a few individuals who believe in Judaism, in the future of Jewish life, can do magnificent work,” said Rabbi Menachem Margolin, the director of the European Jewish Association, a Brussels-based lobby group that hosted the conference in Porto.
Comprising about 1,000 members, the Jewish community of Porto has tripled in size in recent years, partly thanks to the passage in 2015 of a law that gives Portuguese citizenship to descendants of Jews who were expelled from the country during the Inquisition, which began in Portugal in 1536.
Aided by the boost in membership and by the arrival of hundreds of French-Jewish students at the local university, the community in recent years has augmented its synagogue — which for decades had been its sole possession — with a museum, a kosher meat shop, another synagogue and a Jewish cemetery.