ARTSCHUL Prague, formerly the Robert Guttmann Gallery, is an exhibition space of the Jewish Museum in Prague. It is located at U Staré školy 3, in Josefov, the former Jewish Town of Prague, close to the Spanish Synagogue.

The name ARTSCHUL connects the gallery with the memory of the Altschul, the Old School or Old Shul. According to the Jewish Museum in Prague, the Altschul stood in this area from the early thirteenth century until 1686 and is the first reliably documented synagogue in Prague.

ARTSCHUL and the Altschul Memory

The topography of the surrounding street preserves this older layer of Jewish Prague. U Staré školy means “At the Old School”. The same street was formerly known in German and Yiddish as Altschulgasse.

This name is important because the modern gallery belongs to a place already marked by one of the earliest documented institutions of Jewish communal life in Prague. The present function is museological and educational, but the name ARTSCHUL deliberately recalls the older synagogue landscape of Josefov.

Robert Guttmann and the Gallery

The gallery was originally named after Robert Guttmann, a Prague Jewish painter associated with naïve art, Zionist circles and the visual memory of Jewish Prague. Guttmann was born in 1880, deported from Prague to the Łódź ghetto on 16 October 1941, and murdered there on 14 March 1942.

The Robert Guttmann Gallery opened in 2001 as a modern exhibition venue of the Jewish Museum in Prague. Its first exhibition was dedicated to Guttmann’s work and presented paintings, drawings, photographs, manuscripts and archival material connected with his life.

Museum Collections and Reconstruction

The venue covers about 80 square metres and was designed for short-term exhibitions from the museum’s collections. Its controlled light, temperature and humidity conditions allow the display of sensitive materials, including parchments, old printed books, historic textiles and works on paper.

The gallery has presented exhibitions on Jewish life, the persecution of Bohemian and Moravian Jews during the Second World War, Jewish monuments in the Czech Republic and Jewish themes in contemporary visual art.

The Jewish Museum has listed the space as closed for reconstruction. After renovation, ARTSCHUL Prague is planned to function as a gallery and educational centre for short-term exhibitions from the museum’s collections.

The Centro Interpretativo Ephraim Bueno is located at Rua Dr. Ricardo Machado, nº 13, in Figueira de Castelo Rodrigo. It is dedicated to the Jewish presence in the municipality and to Ephraim Bueno, a Jewish physician and writer born in Castelo Rodrigo in 1599.

Ephraim Bueno and the Sephardic diaspora

Ephraim Bueno, also known in Christian or Iberian contexts as Martim Álvares Bueno, belonged to a Portuguese Jewish family whose history later became connected with the Sephardic diaspora in northern Europe. He studied medicine, settled in Amsterdam and became part of the Portuguese Jewish community of the city.

In Amsterdam, Bueno was active as a physician, intellectual and writer. He was also connected to the world of Hebrew and Sephardic printing. His figure is especially known today because Rembrandt van Rijn portrayed him in the seventeenth century. The Rijksmuseum preserves a portrait of Ephraim Bueno painted by Rembrandt between 1645 and 1647.

Bueno died in Amsterdam in 1665 and was buried at Beth Haim, the Portuguese Jewish cemetery in Ouderkerk aan de Amstel, near Amsterdam.

Jewish heritage in Figueira de Castelo Rodrigo

The centre was inaugurated in July 2020 by the Municipality of Figueira de Castelo Rodrigo, during the municipal holiday celebrations. It was created as the main interpretive space for the local Jewish heritage route, bringing together dispersed traces of Jewish presence in the municipality.

The exhibition presents the Jewish history of Figueira de Castelo Rodrigo through royal chancery records, Inquisition processes, local marks of Jewish presence and interpretive material connected to the former judiaria. It includes several exhibition rooms, a small area prepared to function as a synagogue, a replica of Rembrandt’s portrait of Ephraim Bueno and the genealogical tree of his family.

The Centro Interpretativo Ephraim Bueno today

The Centro Interpretativo Ephraim Bueno connects the medieval Jewish presence in Castelo Rodrigo with the later history of Portuguese Jews in Amsterdam. Its importance lies in this bridge between local documentation, frontier Jewish settlement in the Beira Interior and the wider Sephardic diaspora of the seventeenth century.

The Casa da Memória da Presença Judaica is a municipal museum located at Rua das Olarias nº 43, in the historic centre of Castelo Branco. It is dedicated to the Jewish presence in the city, the former Judiaria, and the memory of Jews and New Christians persecuted by the Inquisition.

The museum and its building

The museum opened on 11 November 2016, in buildings acquired and rehabilitated by the Municipality of Castelo Branco. During the intervention, a significant section of the old city wall was kept visible inside the building. The museum was created to present the Jewish history of Castelo Branco through the former Judiaria, local rituals, objects associated with Jewish life, the Inquisition, and figures connected to the city.

The exhibition begins on the ground floor, with reception and shop, where publications and kosher products are available. The same level introduces the foundation of the Judiaria of Castelo Branco, Jewish rituals and festivals, and the mechanisms of inquisitorial persecution.

Casa da Memória da Presença Judaica and the Inquisition

Between the ground floor and the first floor is the Memorial das Vítimas Albicastrenses da Inquisição. This memorial records 329 identified and studied Inquisition processes connected to Castelo Branco. Within this group, 21 people are identified as having died as a result of inquisitorial persecution.

This section is the strongest documentary core of the museum. It connects the Jewish and New Christian history of Castelo Branco not only to the medieval Judiaria, but also to the long afterlife of forced conversion, surveillance, denunciation and trial before the Portuguese Inquisition.

Jewish and New Christian figures

The first floor is dedicated to Jewish and New Christian figures from Castelo Branco, including Amato Lusitano, Afonso de Paiva, Maria Gomes, Elias de Montalto, Moisés de Montalto and Manuel Joaquim Henriques de Paiva. The museum presents these figures within a wider timeline of Jewish presence in Portugal and beyond.

The upper level includes a study and research area, with access to documents, a physical library and digital material related to Jewish history, New Christians and the Inquisition.

The Casa da Memória da Medicina Sefardita Ribeiro Sanches is located on Rua D. Sancho I, in the historic centre of Penamacor. It is the town’s main museum space dedicated to Sephardic medicine, New Christian memory and the history of Portuguese Jews connected to medical practice.

Sephardic medicine in Penamacor

The museum opened in December 2021 and forms part of the wider heritage work associated with the Rede de Judiarias de Portugal. Penamacor was one of the founding municipalities of this network, which places the museum within a national geography of Jewish and Sephardic memory.

Its exhibition is dedicated to figures connected to medical practice and healing, including physicians, físicos and apothecaries of Sephardic origin or New Christian ancestry. It also presents Portuguese Jewish and New Christian doctors whose careers developed beyond Portugal, often after exile, persecution or forced displacement.

The Corredor de Todos os Nomes

The museum is organized into four main areas. The first introduces the Rede de Judiarias de Portugal and situates Penamacor within the broader history of Jewish and New Christian presence in Portugal.

The second area is the Corredor de Todos os Nomes. This corridor includes a mural with about five hundred names identified in Inquisition proceedings from the tribunals of Lisbon, Coimbra and Évora. These names connect the museum directly to the documentary record of New Christians persecuted by the Holy Office.

The third area is dedicated to the Sephardic medical diaspora. It presents major Portuguese Jewish and New Christian physicians from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, including Garcia de Orta, Amato Lusitano and Rodrigo de Castro.

Ribeiro Sanches and the Sephardic medical diaspora

The upper floor is dedicated to António Nunes Ribeiro Sanches, born in Penamacor in 1699, into a New Christian family. This section presents his life, writings, intellectual network and European trajectory, from Portugal to Salamanca, Leiden, Russia and Paris.

Ribeiro Sanches became one of the major Portuguese physicians and intellectuals of the eighteenth century. The Casa da Memória da Medicina Sefardita Ribeiro Sanches connects his biography to the history of medicine, the Enlightenment, the Sephardic diaspora and the consequences of Inquisition persecution.

António Nunes Ribeiro Sanches was born in Penamacor on 7 March 1699. He was the son of Simão Nunes, a shoemaker and merchant, and Ana Nunes Ribeiro. His family belonged to the New Christian population of Beira Baixa, descended from Jews forced to convert in Portugal at the end of the fifteenth century.

New Christian origins and exile

In 1716, Ribeiro Sanches enrolled at the University of Coimbra, where he studied in the field of law. He later moved to Salamanca, where he studied medicine and completed his medical training in 1724.

In 1726, he left Portugal after being denounced to the Inquisition for practices associated with Judaism. This departure placed him within the wider movement of Portuguese New Christians who left the kingdom because of inquisitorial persecution, family pressure, or the search for religious and intellectual freedom.

Ribeiro Sanches in the Sephardic diaspora

His exile first took him to London, where he entered the Portuguese Sephardic environment connected to Bevis Marks and to members of his own family. He later continued his medical formation on the continent and reached Leiden, where he studied under Herman Boerhaave, one of the most influential medical teachers of eighteenth-century Europe.

In 1731, Ribeiro Sanches went to Russia after Boerhaave recommended him for service at the Russian court. He worked as a military physician and later became connected to the imperial medical world of Saint Petersburg. In 1739, he was appointed a member of the Academy of Sciences of Saint Petersburg and was also recognized by the Academy of Sciences in Paris.

After leaving Russia, he settled in Paris in 1747. There he lived among the intellectual networks of the Enlightenment and remained active as a physician, writer and reformist thinker. His works included Dissertation sur la Maladie Vénérienne, Tratado da Conservação da Saúde dos Povos, Cartas sobre a Educação da Mocidade, Método para Aprender e Estudar a Medicina and Mémoire sur les Bains de Vapeur en Russie.

The Casa da Memória and Ribeiro Sanches

António Nunes Ribeiro Sanches became one of the major Portuguese physicians and intellectuals of the eighteenth century. His life connects Penamacor to New Christian history, the Inquisition, the Sephardic diaspora, medical reform, Enlightenment thought and the circulation of scientific knowledge across Europe.

He died in Paris on 14 October 1783. Today, his memory is presented in Penamacor through the Casa da Memória da Medicina Sefardita Ribeiro Sanches, whose upper floor is dedicated to his life, writings and European intellectual network.

Casa da Memória Judaica da Raia Sabugalense is a museum and interpretation center created to present the Jewish and crypto-Jewish history of the Sabugal border region. Opened in 2017 in the historic center of Sabugal, it is not a former synagogue or a preserved medieval Jewish institution, but a modern space built to gather and explain the local evidence.

The Museum

The museum focuses on the historical presence of Jews in Sabugal and on the later history of New Christians and crypto-Jews in the region. Its importance lies in making that material legible through documents, local history, and exhibition narrative. Instead of centering on one monumental object, it presents a broader picture of Jewish life, forced conversion, concealment, and persecution in this border area.

Inquisition and Local History

One of the strongest points of the institution is its use of inquisitorial documentation. The exhibition material highlights the high number of Inquisition cases from Sabugal linked to accusations of Judaizing, showing how deeply this history marked the town and its surroundings. In that sense, the Casa da Memória Judaica da Raia Sabugalense is important because it turns a regional and often overlooked history into a structured public memory.

The Sabugal Border Region

The museum also helps place Sabugal within the wider history of the Portuguese-Spanish borderlands, where mobility, refuge, commerce, and religious pressure shaped Jewish and New Christian experience over time. Its value is therefore not architectural, but historical and interpretive.

Jewish Cultural Center Rua da Judiaria & JCC Lisbon was founded in 2019 by Luciano Waldman in Lisbon’s old Judiaria of Alfama. It was created to restore visibility to Rua da Judiaria and to establish an active institution dedicated to Jewish heritage, research, education, and public culture.

Rua da Judiaria was central to the project from the start. The street preserves, in its own name, a direct urban trace of medieval Jewish Lisbon. The center was therefore established in a place where Jewish memory had survived in the toponymy and the urban fabric, but where there was still no living Jewish institution focused on interpretation, education, and continuity.

First Phase of the Center

In its first years, the center focused on the preservation and promotion of Jewish-Portuguese heritage. Its work included historical interpretation, guided visits, cultural programming, exhibitions, lectures, and activities related to Sephardic history and memory. Over time, it became a meeting point for visitors, researchers, artists, diplomats, schools, local residents, and Jewish communities.

This phase defined the institution’s identity. Rather than treating Jewish history as a decorative layer of the city, the center used Rua da Judiaria as a starting point for a broader reading of Jewish Lisbon, from the medieval quarters to forced conversion, the Inquisition, and the modern return of Jewish communal life.

Expansion of the Project

As the project developed, its scope expanded beyond Alfama. Rua da Judiaria became the base for a wider institutional vision linking heritage preservation, Jewish education, contemporary culture, environmental awareness, and civic memory. Within that framework, the center developed initiatives such as intercultural dialogue meetings, exhibitions, Tu BiShvat activities, Reverse Tashlich, and the Daffodil Project.

The creation of JCC Lisbon added a contemporary communal dimension to this work. It reinforced the idea that Jewish heritage in Portugal should not be reduced to ruins or absence. Jewish life is also educational, ethical, communal, and present.

Stolpersteine Portugal

A major step in the institution’s development was the creation and coordination of Stolpersteine Portugal. Through the work of Luciano Waldman and the Centro Cultural Rua da Judiaria, Portugal joined one of Europe’s most important decentralized Holocaust remembrance projects. This required historical research, biographical reconstruction, municipal coordination, and public commemoration, expanding the institution’s mission from local heritage to national memory.

In 2026, that work gained new visibility with the installation of Portugal’s first Stolperschwelle in Lisbon, dedicated to refugees who passed through the city while fleeing Nazism. This confirmed the institution’s ability to connect historical research with public memory in concrete form.

Jew Where

Today, Jewish Cultural Center Rua da Judiaria & JCC Lisbon is entering a new phase through Jew Where, a digital platform dedicated to mapping and interpreting Jewish heritage in Lisbon, Portugal, and beyond. What began in 2019 in one historic street has expanded into a broader project of heritage interpretation, remembrance, cultural programming, community-building, and digital mapping.

The Jewish Museum of Belmonte is one of the clearest places in Portugal for understanding how Jewish life could survive rupture, silence, and forced concealment, and later return to public view. Opened in 2005 as the first museum in the country dedicated specifically to Jewish heritage, it was created not simply to display objects, but to tell the unusually long and layered story of Belmonte: medieval presence, forced conversion, crypto-Jewish endurance, and the gradual reemergence of communal Jewish life in the modern era.

What the museum offers, above all, is historical continuity. It does not present Judaism as an abstract religion detached from place, but as something lived locally across centuries, sometimes openly, sometimes in secrecy, always under changing conditions. In Belmonte, that means the museum helps translate family memory, ritual fragments, domestic practice, and historical rupture into a coherent public narrative. It gives institutional form to a history that for a long time survived without one.

Its collection reflects that purpose. The museum preserves more than one hundred objects, including religious pieces, domestic materials, and items linked to everyday and professional life, especially from Jewish families of Beira Interior and Trás-os-Montes. Rather than functioning as a generic display of ceremonial Judaica, the collection is tied to lived experience, to the material world through which Jewish identity was practiced, adapted, and remembered in Portugal.

Samuel Schwarz belongs naturally within this story. More than a scholar who wrote about Belmonte from the outside, he became one of the central figures in the modern recognition of the town’s Jewish past. His work helped bring broader attention to the survival of crypto-Jewish life in Portugal, and Belmonte became inseparable from that discovery. The museum itself has acknowledged this connection directly, including exhibitions in his honor and later efforts by the municipality to bring Schwarz-related material into the museum’s orbit.

In that sense, the museum does more than preserve objects. It gathers together memory, scholarship, and communal history in the very town where those strands meet most powerfully. Belmonte is not only one of the places Samuel Schwarz helped the world to see more clearly, it is also one of the places where that recovered history was eventually given a permanent institutional home.

Béjar, a charming town south of the city of Salamanca, is very well known in the Hebrew world, above all because many Jews bear this city as a surname. Apparently, as Samuel Francés, president of the Bulgarian Jewish community, once told me, it was very common in the Jewish world during the Middle Ages, more specifically among the Sephardim scattered across the planet after the decree of expulsion by the Catholic Monarchs in 1492, to adopt as a surname the city from which the parents and grandparents of those unfortunate descendants originally came. Most of the Sephardim expelled, first from Spain and then from Portugal, settled in the Balkans, North Africa, the Ottoman Empire, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and some even reached the Caribbean islands.

As we can read on the pages of the Museo Judío David Melul, “Tens of thousands of people in the world bear the surnames Béjar, Behar, Bejarano, Becerano, or any of the different variations of the name, modified over time and by its use in places with different alphabets and phonetic systems. Many of them are Jews or descendants of Sephardic Jews who left Spain, but who preserved not only the name of their native place, but also the language, the customs, and the affection for a longed-for life that led them to preserve and transmit that intangible legacy during the following five centuries.”

But before continuing with this account, it is worth reviewing the history of this singular institution and the origin of its name. The Museo Judío de Béjar was the initiative of a very singular man, curious, hardworking, and a great philanthropist, David Melul, who, with the help of its current director, Antonio Avilés, gave life to this dream of creating this center of Jewish culture in the heart of the Salamanca mountains.

On the museum’s pages, we found this short biography of Melul, which we reproduce here in translation: “David Melul, creator and patron of the museum that bears his name, was born in Melilla on April 20, 1928. In 1946 he arrived in Béjar to study at what was then called the School of Industrial Experts, today the Higher Technical School of Industrial Engineering of the University of Salamanca. He spent several years in the city and completed his textile engineering studies in Tarrasa. He settled in Barcelona, specifically in the building where the headquarters of the Jewish community was located, on Avenida de Roma. There he met his wife, Adelina Nacmías, with whom he had five children: Daniel, Rafael, Raquel, Mario, and Víctor. It was also in this city that he launched his first industrial projects through a pioneering and innovative textile company focused on household products: Hispano Tex.”

Later, throughout his long life, Melul remained linked to Béjar and visited the city on many occasions, and apparently, “on one of those trips, at the end of the 1990s, he promoted the creation of this museum based on his knowledge of the city’s Hebrew past and on his interest in contributing, through his help, to the dissemination of Jewish culture and history,” as the museum’s website continues to inform us.

THE SECOND JEWISH MUSEUM IN SPAIN, AFTER THE ONE IN TOLEDO

With Melul’s financial support, after he purchased the house where the project is located, and with the invaluable help of the Ayuntamiento de Béjar, the museum opened its doors as the second Jewish museum in Spain, the first and best known being that of Toledo. The museum is spread over three floors, with several sections distributed across them: on the first level the visitor will find information on the history of the Jews in Spain; on the first floor there is a section dedicated to the conversos in Spain after the expulsion; and finally, on the second floor, completing the cycle of those who decided to remain in their faith and leave Spain, there is the section dedicated to the Sephardim. The museum also has a lecture hall, a small library, closed, and a researchers’ room, as well as toilets on the ground floor and a small shop with some objects and books relating to Jewish culture. The place opened its doors for the first time in 2006, and thousands of visitors have already passed through this peaceful space dedicated to our Hebrew roots.

Regarding the beautiful house that hosts this important institution in a city that once had an important and representative Jewish quarter, the museum’s website tells us that it is located in “a manor house from the mid or late fifteenth century, situated within a monumental ensemble made up of the Church of Santa María la Mayor, with a thirteenth-century Mudéjar apse, several interesting bourgeois houses, an old eighteenth-century textile factory with the coat of arms of Charles III on its façade, as well as the glove factory building, dating from the mid nineteenth century.”

Béjar, according to the chronicles and what we have been able to see in the museum, was a city that had an important Jewish quarter during the Middle Ages until, in 1492, the famous edict of the Catholic Monarchs abruptly ended forever that peaceful coexistence among Jews, Christians, and Muslims in what the Sephardim, still today, continue to call Sefarad. The Hebrew presence in this town, known for its past linked to an important textile industry that declined in the 1980s, dates back to the thirteenth century and gives it major importance in an area where significant Jewish life also existed in several nearby settlements, such as Hervás, which has one of the most important and best preserved Jewish quarters in Spain, and Plasencia, also regarded as an important Jewish center in that period.

This Museo Judío de Béjar, located very close to the Ducal Palace that once housed the Dukes of Béjar, invites us to learn about a past so closely tied to our heritage and identity that it is worth visiting, knowing, and learning a little more about our distant and also close origins, since without understanding our rich history we cannot understand the present. For all these reasons, these lines invite you to come to Béjar and learn something more about our history in this small museum, yet one great in knowledge, the Museo Judío David Melul.

Centro Sefarad-Israel is a Spanish public diplomacy institution created as an inter-administrative consortium to serve as a bridge between Spain and the Jewish world. Established on 18 December 2006 through an agreement involving Spain’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (together with the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation, AECID), the Community of Madrid, and the Madrid City Council, it operates with a cultural and educational mandate rather than as a religious institution.

Its core mission is to foster knowledge of Jewish culture in Spanish civil society, with particular attention to Sephardic heritage as a living component of Spanish culture. In parallel, the institution promotes dialogue and cooperation between Spanish society and Israeli society through mutual cultural knowledge, and it maintains collaborations with Sephardic communities worldwide. This mission is pursued through a steady public program that typically includes lectures, seminars, concerts, book presentations, temporary exhibitions, and film screenings, delivered both onsite and through online formats.

The center’s headquarters are located at Calle Mayor 69, in Madrid’s historic core, within the Palacio de Cañete, a municipal property on the Calle Mayor whose Herrerian-style façade and corner towers have shaped the streetscape since the seventeenth century. Municipal documentation regarding the move to this building often uses the earlier institutional name “Casa Sefarad-Israel.” A 2009 protocol between the Madrid City Council and Spain’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs formalized the installation of the institution’s headquarters in the palace, associating the site with exhibition spaces, a conference room, and library-related services designed to support public access to Jewish and Sephardic cultural knowledge.

A further expansion of its public-facing infrastructure took place through cooperation with the city’s library network. Following a 2021 agreement published in Spain’s official state gazette, the center deposited a specialized collection of 400 titles on Jewish themes, enabling the creation of a dedicated and clearly identifiable section within the Biblioteca Pública Municipal Iván de Vargas. This initiative, publicly referenced as the “Biblioteca Centro Sefarad-Israel / Isaac Revah,” reinforced the institution’s educational role by integrating a curated Judaic and Sephardic collection into a broader municipal public library system.