Vhils’ WWII Refugee Mural in Lisbon was installed in 2023 near the Rocha Conde de Óbidos Maritime Terminal, in connection with the 136th anniversary of the Port of Lisbon and with efforts to recall Lisbon’s role as a point of departure for refugees escaping Europe during the Second World War, many of them Jews.

The mural is based on a wartime photograph by Roger Kahan, a French Jewish refugee and photographer who passed through Lisbon in 1940. Rather than inventing a symbolic image from scratch, Vhils reworked a documented refugee scene connected to the port itself. The image chosen shows a refugee beside a post box before departure, and the mural was placed next to that same surviving post box at Rocha Conde de Óbidos.

Its importance lies in the precision of that connection between image and place. The mural fixes refugee memory in the exact port landscape through which these departures took place, using an image made by someone who was himself part of that history.

Opened as a seaplane gateway on the Tagus waterfront, Cabo Ruivo was Lisbon’s “river airport” in the era of long-range flying boats. Pan American established a provisional base here in 1938, and the site became a strategic point for intercontinental air travel, especially during the Second World War, when Lisbon functioned as an entry and escape corridor in neutral Portugal.

The first scheduled commercial passenger flight arrived on 29 June 1939, when Pan Am’s Boeing 314 “Dixie Clipper” reached Cabo Ruivo after departing Port Washington, New York, continuing onward toward Marseille as part of the transatlantic route.

Built context and location

In 1942, the Portuguese government decided to create a proper air-marine base and structured the airport around the Doca dos Olivais. To link the seaplane airport with the land airport at Portela, a major road connection was built, originally called Avenida Entre-os-Aeroportos, today Avenida de Berlim.

Wartime threshold: what can, and cannot, be counted

A precise number of “refugees who entered by plane” is difficult to establish from the published record because most statistics refer to total passenger traffic rather than refugee status.

What can be quantified is the scale of the air-sea entry channel. A detailed study of Lisbon’s wartime travel economy records that, by the end of 1939, more than thirty-nine transatlantic flying boats had already brought 643 passengers to Cabo Ruivo, and that in the six following years another 16,000 passengers still used this means of transport to disembark in Lisbon. These figures describe passengers, not exclusively refugees, but they define the order of magnitude of the route that included refugee travel.

Refugee entry and stories tied to the Clipper route

Contemporary historical writing describes Pan American’s Clipper service as an emblematic escape vehicle for those who could afford it, a “luxurious seaplane” flying twice weekly between Lisbon and New York during the war years.

Photographic documentation from the period, held in archives and community collections, records Cabo Ruivo as a waterfront threshold of wartime mobility: arrivals and departures by flying boat, passengers with luggage and documents, uniforms and ground crews, waiting areas, and the choreography of transit along the Tagus, in an airport that no longer functions as an airport but remains identifiable as a place.

Critical event: the Yankee Clipper crash (1943)

Cabo Ruivo’s history also includes disaster. On 22 February 1943, Pan Am’s Boeing 314 “Yankee Clipper” crashed while attempting to land on the River Tagus in Lisbon, killing 24 of the 39 people on board, with 15 survivors recorded in accident documentation.

Afterlife of the site

As land-based aviation became dominant after the war, the flying-boat era ended. Cabo Ruivo’s seaplane operations were discontinued in the late 1950s (often given as 1958/59), and the waterfront area was later reshaped through major redevelopment associated with Expo ’98 and today’s Parque das Nações.

The Hannah Arendt Memorial in Lisbon takes the form of a small ground intervention rather than a conventional monument. Inaugurated on 10 December 2018, International Human Rights Day, it was installed at the corner of Rua da Sociedade Farmacêutica and Rua Conde de Redondo, close to the address most often associated with Arendt’s stay in the city, Rua da Sociedade Farmacêutica 6B. The proposal came from the LIVRE party in the Lisbon Municipal Assembly, was approved unanimously, and was then implemented by the city’s cultural department.

Hannah Arendt in Lisbon

The memorial marks a precise moment in Hannah Arendt’s life. A German Jewish philosopher and refugee from Nazism, she was in Lisbon between January and May 1941, together with her husband Heinrich Blücher and her mother, while waiting for the documents and passage that would allow them to leave for the United States. Her stay lasted about three and a half months, during the period when Lisbon served as one of the main Atlantic routes of escape from occupied Europe.

Form and Location

The memorial is deliberately discreet. Rather than a statue designed to dominate the square, it consists of two inscribed bands set into two low steps in the pavement. One records Arendt’s presence in Lisbon as a refugee from the Nazi regime. The other carries a quotation connected to her reflections on refugees and exile. Its placement at ground level matters because it turns an ordinary street corner into a place of reading and memory without separating it from the city’s daily movement.

Historical Significance

What gives the memorial its force is its precision. It links Hannah Arendt to a specific address, a specific crossing of streets, and a specific historical moment in which refugees in Lisbon waited for visas, ships, and permission to begin again. In this case, the memorial does not monumentalize Arendt in the abstract. It ties her directly to Lisbon’s wartime history as a transit city of exile and escape.

Founded in 1899 as a Jewish charitable institution, the Cozinha Económica Israelita became one of Lisbon’s most important community-run relief services, especially during the refugee crisis of the Second World War.

By the late 1910s, it was operating in Travessa do Noronha, a short dead-end lane just below Rua da Escola Politécnica and near Jardim do Príncipe Real, an urban setting that would later become strongly associated with wartime transit, hunger, paperwork, and survival.

Institutional context

Because the Jewish community in Lisbon faced long periods without full legal recognition, communal life was often consolidated through autonomous benevolent institutions. In the official historical narrative of the Comunidade Israelita de Lisboa (CIL), the Cozinha Económica appears alongside other key welfare initiatives as a foundational pillar of organized Jewish life in modern Lisbon.

During the Second World War, this support network expanded dramatically. Financed through international Jewish aid, including the American Joint Distribution Committee, the community maintained the Cozinha Económica and other services, distributing food, clothing, and medical support to refugees in transit through Portugal.

The Travessa do Noronha complex

Contemporary reporting identifies a small institutional cluster in Travessa do Noronha: the soup kitchen at no. 17, a Jewish hospital at no. 19, and a shelter or albergue at no. 21.

This was not only a social service address, it was a micro-geography of wartime Lisbon. Refugees, aid workers, and state surveillance all intersected here, and the street entered later memory as a place where daily subsistence and bureaucratic uncertainty were lived side by side.

Material object with a biography: meal tickets

One of the most revealing material traces of the Cozinha Económica is the meal-ticket system. Refugees who needed to eat there received senhas de refeição, a practical mechanism that turned communal aid into an organized, trackable routine.

A surviving example, reproduced in press coverage, is a meal ticket issued in the name of the child refugee Benjamin Schlesinger, linking the institution to specific lives and family trajectories, not only to abstract numbers.

Scale of assistance

Sources describe the Cozinha Económica as providing hundreds of meals per day and as part of a wider effort that supported thousands of Jewish refugees passing through Portugal during the war years.

A decisive rupture: sale, demolition, and disappearance

After the postwar period, the physical site did not remain intact. Reporting based on community testimony states that the CIL sold the Travessa do Noronha buildings in 1959 or 1960, after which the original structures were demolished and replaced by later developments. The area saw further demolition again in 2019 in the context of new real-estate projects.

A contemporary gesture of memory

To mark and honor this historic site in the urban fabric, the Centro Cultural Rua da Judiaria already has a Stolperschwellen prepared to be installed on the pavement in front of the building, creating a visible, permanent point of remembrance for the Cozinha Económica Israelita and the lives sustained here. The installation is planned for 2026.

Installed in 2008 in the square facing the Church of São Domingos, this memorial marks the site associated with the outbreak of the Lisbon massacre of April 1506 and stands today as one of the city’s most direct public statements on anti-Jewish violence and the fragility of civic order.

The memorial was created by Graça Bachmann, following suggestions and a proposal connected to the Jewish community, and was inaugurated in a public ceremony that brought together municipal authorities and representatives of different faiths.

Formally, the work is a truncated stone sphere, described in official cultural listings as a “world” cut open, a deliberate image of rupture, violence, and chaos. In the plane of that cut, a Magen David is carved out and filled with an inscription that anchors the memorial in place, time, and meaning.

Inside the Star of David, the Portuguese text remembers “the thousands of Jews” who were victims of intolerance and religious fanaticism, murdered in the massacre that began on 19 April 1506 “in this square”. The dates appear both in the Gregorian calendar (1506–2006) and in the Hebrew years (5266–5766), explicitly linking Lisbon’s local trauma to a Jewish chronology of memory.

At the base, on the rectangular stone plinth supporting the sculpture, a Hebrew inscription quotes the Book of Job, traditionally identified as Job 16:18, a short sentence that refuses erasure: “O earth, do not hide my blood, do not hide my cry.” This detail is crucial because it turns the monument into more than a marker, it makes it a moral demand, inscribed at street level, in a place of daily passage.

The event remembered here began in late April 1506 amid crisis, fear, and religious agitation. Contemporary and later accounts describe how violence spread through the city and targeted the so-called “New Christians”, Jews forcibly converted in Portugal, and those suspected of judaizing. Modern scholarship commonly places the death toll somewhere between roughly 1,000 and 4,000 people.

The memorial also sits within a broader institutional landscape of public memory in this square. Next to it, another monument and related initiatives were presented as gestures of remembrance and reconciliation, showing how Largo de São Domingos has become a concentrated urban site where Lisbon narrates a difficult chapter of its own history.

The Jewish inscriptions preserved in the Museu Arqueológico do Carmo form one of the most important groups of Hebrew epigraphy in Portugal. The museum was founded in 1864 by the Associação dos Arqueólogos Portugueses and is installed in the ruins of the former Carmo Church, in central Lisbon. Within its collection, the key Jewish pieces are two funerary stelae from Espiche, near Lagos, and the monumental inscription from the former Synagogue of Monchique, in Porto.

Espiche Stele, Aba Marieh and Rabbi Isaac HaCohen

Catalogue no. 3877. Provenance: Espiche, near Lagos. Entered the museum in 1874.

This is a prismatic funerary stele with inscriptions on three faces. It records two burials at different moments: Aba Marieh and Rabbi Isaac HaCohen, son of Iakhai. The text preserves standard Hebrew funerary formulas and shows that the same stone was reused for two individuals. It is one of the clearest Jewish funerary inscriptions from medieval Portugal preserved in a museum collection.

Espiche Stele, Rab Moshe and Cohen son of Karbin

Catalogue no. 3878. Provenance: Espiche, near Lagos. Entered the museum in 1874.

This second Espiche stone is also funerary. It is a prismatic stele with a damaged inscription, which makes the reading incomplete. The surviving text refers to a rabbi whose name begins with Moshe and to a Cohen, son of Karbin, followed by a funerary formula. Even in its damaged state, the stone remains an important witness to Hebrew burial epigraphy in the Algarve.

Monchique Synagogue Inscription

Catalogue no. 2313. Provenance: former Synagogue of Monchique, Porto. Transferred to the museum on 3 February 1875. Material: granite. Dimensions: 1.54 m x 0.63 m.

This is the most important Jewish inscription in the Carmo Museum. Unlike the Espiche stones, it is not funerary but communal. It comes from the former Synagogue of Monchique in Porto and preserves a commemorative synagogue text. Its significance lies in the fact that it is a rare surviving inscription directly connected to medieval Jewish institutional life in Portugal.

Lisbon’s main active Jewish cemetery is located on Rua Afonso III, in the area historically linked to Calçada das Lages. It stands as a key landmark in the reconstitution of Jewish communal life in the city during the 19th century, when small groups of Jews began settling in Portugal again, even before the official abolition of the Inquisition in 1821.

According to the Lisbon Jewish Community’s own records, in 1868 King Luís granted “the Jews of Lisbon permission to establish a cemetery for the burial of their fellow Jews.” This authorization formalized Calçada das Lages (today associated with Afonso III) as the community’s central burial ground, a document of both religious continuity and the gradual public reappearance of Jewish life in Lisbon.

The cemetery’s history is closely linked to communal organization. In 1892, the Civil Government charter ratified the statutes of the Guemilut Hassadim Association, founded by Moses Anahory, responsible for mutual aid and funerals. The association managed burials, oversaw the two cemeteries, and kept the death registers, ensuring that Jewish burial practice and documentation remained organized across generations.

This site also connects to an earlier chapter of modern Jewish Lisbon. A small Jewish plot was obtained in the Estrela cemetery area in 1801, and the first recorded grave there was José Amzalaga, who died on February 26, 1804. That earlier plot served the community until the mid 19th century, when the Calçada das Lages cemetery became the principal active cemetery.

Rua da Judiaria, in Alfama, is one of Lisbon’s most direct surviving urban references to the city’s medieval Jewish presence. Its importance does not lie in a monumental building that has remained intact, but in the persistence of a name attached to a specific street, a rare toponymic trace of the Judiaria Pequena, also known as the Judiaria de Alfama. In this sense, Rua da Judiaria preserves a fragment of Jewish Lisbon within the dense medieval fabric of the eastern slope above the Tagus.

Rua da Judiaria and the Judiaria Pequena

Historical and archaeological studies connect this area to the late medieval Jewish quarter of Alfama. The street links the zone of Beco das Barrelas to the Largo do Terreiro do Trigo, within a landscape shaped by the old defensive structures of Lisbon and by the riverfront economy. In this context, the formation of the Jewish quarter appears to have been reinforced in the 14th century, when documentary tradition places the construction of a synagogue in or near this urban setting around 1373. However, the exact identification of that synagogue must be treated with caution, since the evidence depends on historical references and later archaeological interpretation rather than on a fully preserved building.

From Jewish quarter to transformed urban space

The end of the 15th century radically changed the meaning of this place. In 1496, King Manuel I issued the decree ordering Jews and Muslims to leave Portugal, with the deadline extending into 1497. As a result, public Jewish life was dismantled, and the former judiarias lost their legal, religious and administrative function. Even so, urban memory did not disappear at once. Former Jewish quarters were gradually absorbed into the Christian city, while some houses continued to be occupied by New Christians in the years after the forced conversions.

Memory, absence and continuity

Today, Rua da Judiaria should be read as both presence and absence. It is not a preserved Jewish quarter in the physical sense, nor should it be treated as a place where every stone can be confidently linked to Jewish life. Its value is more precise: it preserves the name, the location and the historical memory of a medieval Jewish space that was later transformed. The presence of the Centro Cultural Judaico Rua da Judiaria on the same street adds a contemporary layer to this memory, reconnecting the place with Jewish heritage, research and public interpretation in Lisbon.

Inaugurated on May 18, 1904, the Lisbon Synagogue, known as Shaaré Tikvá (Gates of Hope), is the principal synagogue in Lisbon and the first synagogue built from scratch in Portugal since the forced conversions and the official extinction of Portuguese Judaism at the end of the 15th century.

The building was the result of a long communal effort to move from modest, improvised houses of prayer to a purpose-built temple. Community records mention several prayer spaces operating in private houses from at least 1810, and they situate the long path toward institutional consolidation in the 19th century, including efforts to unify different congregational groups and services.

A decisive organizational step came in 1897, with the “Inaugural Session of the Israeli Committee of Lisbon” (Comité Israelita de Lisboa), chaired by Leão Amzalak and led by figures such as Simão Anahory and Abraham Bensaúde. A commission for the construction of a single synagogue was created, aiming to serve the whole community.

The architectural project was commissioned to Miguel Ventura Terra, one of the most prominent Portuguese architects of his time. The synagogue was built at no. 59 Rua Alexandre Herculano, but not as a street-facing monument. Portuguese law then restricted non-Catholic temples from having a façade directly visible from the public road, so the building was constructed inside a walled courtyard, accessed through a gate to the street, a spatial solution that became part of its identity.

In plan and ritual orientation, Shaaré Tikvá follows a rectangular, symmetrical layout and faces Jerusalem. Heritage and tourism descriptions often emphasize its austere and eclectic language, combining historicist references and frequently described as drawing on Roman, Byzantine, and Romantic vocabularies.

The construction process itself is unusually well documented in communal memory. The cornerstone was laid on May 25, 1902, and the work proceeded under the direction of Abílio Pereira de Campos. The inauguration in 1904 gathered the Jewish community of Lisbon and included the Rabbi of Gibraltar, Moisés Benazim.

The building’s 20th-century life included significant transformation. The synagogue’s records describe restoration works and a major expansion directed by architect Carlos Ramos in 1948; other heritage summaries place this intervention in 1948–1949, reflecting a wider postwar phase of repair and enlargement.

A second decisive cycle came in the early 2000s. The synagogue has been classified as a Property of Public Interest (Imóvel de Interesse Público) since 2002. Around the centenary, extensive restoration and improvement works were carried out between 2002 and 2004, including changes to the boundary wall and updates to interior color and lighting, under architects João Seabra and Ricardo Gordon, with support from Portuguese state bodies, Lisbon City Council, and community-linked donors.

One heritage moment highlighted in the synagogue’s own narrative was the centenary commemoration held on September 9, 2004, attended by Israel’s Sephardic Chief Rabbi Shlomo Moshe Amar, the President of Portugal Jorge Sampaio, and representatives of other faith communities.

From a heritage perspective, Shaaré Tikvá is a document of modern Jewish reappearance in Lisbon, not only through its ritual life but also through its architecture of constrained visibility, a synagogue intentionally set back from the street. Its classification as Imóvel de Interesse Público places it within Portugal’s protected built heritage framework.

Founded in 1934, the Ohel Jacob Synagogue is Lisbon’s only Ashkenazi synagogue and, today, a Progressive (Reform) congregation linked to the Hehaver Community. Located on the upper floor of a residential building, it represents a different kind of Jewish landmark, intimate in scale and shaped by migration, refuge, and the rebuilding of Jewish life in Portugal.

The synagogue grew out of the Association of Israelite Youth Hehaver, founded in 1925 in a context of renewed religious freedom in the early Portuguese Republic. The first communal meetings began in Hehaver premises, and the synagogue was established by a small group of Ashkenazi Jews from Central Europe, many of them Polish. From its beginnings, Ohel Jacob developed a reputation for openness, especially toward Jews of diverse backgrounds and toward descendants of Portuguese anusim, also known as b’nei anusim.

Architecturally, Ohel Jacob is defined by its setting and scale. Reached by stairs to the second floor, the synagogue occupies an adapted apartment plan. The sanctuary is organized around a clear axis between the bimah and the Aron Hakodesh. In recent renovation phases, the community also reorganized its internal spaces, including the transfer of its small museum collection to one of the larger rooms within the apartment.

Ohel Jacob’s identity is inseparable from its people and its institutional memory. The community records its early leadership, including Samuel Sorin as the synagogue’s first leader in 1934. In the 21st century, Ohel Jacob formalized its links with Progressive Judaism through affiliation with the European Union for Progressive Judaism and the World Union for Progressive Judaism.

One material detail often stays with visitors: the synagogue’s Torah scroll collection, associated by the community with Jewish refugees from Nazi Europe, includes a fragment linked to survival during Kristallnacht. In parallel, the community has documented efforts to rehabilitate and preserve its Torah scrolls so they can remain in active ritual use, not only as objects of memory.

From a heritage perspective, Ohel Jacob matters precisely because it is not a showpiece building. It is a living record of Lisbon as a place of arrival, refuge, and religious reconstruction. Its modest setting, its role in welcoming b’nei anusim, and its continued ritual life make it a key reference point for understanding modern Jewish presence in Portugal.