Shaar Hashamaim, “Portico of Heaven,” was founded in 1813 in what was then Beco da Linheira, today Travessa do Ferragial, under the leadership of Rabbi Abraham Dabella. It is generally identified as the first public synagogue of modern Lisbon, at a moment when the Jewish presence in the city was beginning to take shape again, although still without full legal recognition. Early twentieth-century reference sources emphasize precisely this ambiguous situation: Jews were tolerated, but did not yet have a fully stabilized status, which makes this foundation a particularly important milestone in the return of organized Jewish life to the Portuguese capital.

The creation of the synagogue did not arise out of nowhere. From the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, small Jewish groups, connected above all to international trade, were settling again in Lisbon; in 1801 they had already obtained a burial space in the English cemetery of Estrela, and in the following decade there were private or rudimentary places of worship. Shaar Hashamaim thus marked the passage from a discreet and domestic religious practice to a more stable communal structure, although still conditioned by the legal limitations imposed on non-Catholic worship.

The importance of this synagogue is also measured by the continuity it generated. After the death of Abraham Dabella, in 1853, its administration passed to a committee composed of Leão Amzalak, Levy Bensabath, Abraham Cohen, Fortunato Naure, Mair, and Moisés Buzaglo. This shows that Shaar Hashamaim was not an isolated episode, but part of a broader process of institutional consolidation. A recent study points in the same direction by linking this nucleus to the genealogy of the future Jewish Community of Lisbon and indicating that the synagogue remained active in 1913.

The street itself also helps to read this history. The old Beco da Linheira officially came to be called Travessa do Ferragial by decree of 7 November 1874, preserving only indirectly the memory of the place where the synagogue functioned. Although the material history of the building still remains somewhat unclear today in the more accessible bibliography, Shaar Hashamaim retains an exceptional historical value: it was one of the first spaces in which the modern Jewish presence in Lisbon ceased to be merely tolerated in private and acquired a communal, urban, and lasting form.