The Olive Tree in Memory of the 60th Anniversary of Auschwitz’s Liberation is located in the garden of Escola Secundária Carlos Amarante, in Braga. It was planted on 15 June 2005 by Aaron Ram, then Ambassador of Israel to Portugal, during a commemorative act marking sixty years since the liberation of Auschwitz.

The memorial

The memorial consists of an olive tree and a commemorative plaque. Local references describe the plaque as dedicated to the memory of the victims of Auschwitz and mention the presence of a Yiddish lullaby. The site is therefore simple in form, but specific in meaning: a living tree placed beside a written mark of remembrance.

The school setting

The available sources do not state explicitly why Escola Secundária Carlos Amarante was chosen. Even so, its location in a school garden gives the memorial a clear public and educational character. It places the memory of Auschwitz within an everyday space of learning, rather than within a monumental or institutional setting.

The value of this memorial lies in its restraint: it preserves the memory of the Shoah through a modest gesture, combining a tree, a plaque, and the setting of a school.

The former synagogue of Rawalpindi, located on Nishtar Street in Babu Mohallah, is one of the most singular remnants of Jewish presence in present-day Pakistan. The building is generally described as the last still recognizable example of the city’s Jewish architecture and should be understood not as an isolated structure, but as a material remnant of a community that for decades maintained religious life, its own social framework, and a place within Rawalpindi’s commercial urban fabric.

The history of this community is connected to the arrival of Jews from Mashhad, in Persia, who sought refuge in 1839 after violent persecution. Many of these refugees settled in Babu Mohallah, a neighborhood then favorable to trade and well positioned within wider networks of circulation and exchange. There, the Jews of Mashhad found the conditions to rebuild collective life and, over time, established a synagogue and a communal hall within an urban setting marked by the coexistence of different religious traditions.

From an architectural perspective, the building still preserves elements that explain its visual force even in a worn condition. Stars of David remain visible on the façade, and several descriptions also mention decorative motifs such as winged forms and Masonic symbols. Set between a Bohra mosque, a Victorian church, and a Hindu temple, the former Jewish building condenses within a single street the memory of a Rawalpindi that was once more diverse and plural than the present-day cityscape might suggest. The accessible sources, however, do not securely identify either the building number or the architect.

The decline of the community was directly tied to the Partition of India in 1947. The new border between India and Pakistan caused a profound rupture in local life, leading many Jewish families of Rawalpindi to leave, in several cases for Bombay, while the remaining families departed gradually over the following decades, into the 1960s. The disappearance of the community was not immediate, but Partition marked the beginning of its definitive collapse.

Today, the former building survives amid residential and commercial adaptations, detached from its original function yet still charged with historical meaning. Its value lies not only in the fact that it once served as a synagogue, but in the way it bears witness to an almost erased layer of the city: that of a Jewish community formed by refugees, integrated into the mercantile networks of Punjab, and later undone by the major political upheavals of the twentieth century. In Rawalpindi, Jewish memory does not survive as a restored monument, but as a vulnerable, discreet, and historically revealing urban fragment.

The Ancient Jewish Cemetery of Estrela is the first Jewish burial ground of modern Lisbon, created at a time when Jewish presence as a public religious practice was still fragile and recent. In the early 19th century, small groups of Jews, mainly from Morocco and Gibraltar, began to resettle in Portugal, with communities forming in Lisbon, the Azores, and Faro. In Lisbon, many cautiously retained British citizenship, a factor that helps explain the cemetery’s connection to the grounds of the British Cemetery in Estrela.

In 1801, a small plot of land was obtained within the British Cemetery of Estrela to allow burials according to Jewish ritual. The earliest identified grave is that of José Amzalaga, who died on 26 February 1804, as recorded in the epitaph. For approximately six decades, this was the main burial place for the Jewish population of Lisbon, until 1865, when the space became saturated.

From a material perspective, the cemetery is small in scale, with around 150 graves, mostly marked by horizontal gravestones in the Sephardic tradition. Cleaning and stabilization actions were recorded, including the consolidation of walls, during interventions carried out in the 2010s.

Jewish funerary continuity in the city was reorganized from 1868 onward, when a royal decree authorized the creation of a new cemetery on Calçada das Lages, today Avenida Afonso III, which remains the active cemetery of the community. Later, in 1892, the statutes of the Guemilut Hassadim Association were ratified, assigning it the mission of providing religious and funerary support and of administering both cemeteries, the one at Rua Nova à Estrela and the one at Calçada das Lages, including death records.

Today, the former cemetery remains largely invisible and is, in practice, not open to visitors, even when visiting the British Cemetery itself, where the Jewish graves are explicitly described as inaccessible.

In recent years, the surrounding urban context has brought the site back into public debate. The transformation of the so-called English Quarter into a private residential complex includes reference to the former Jewish cemetery and a proposal to keep it covered by a landscaped pergola, specifically to reduce its visibility from the surrounding residences. Public discussion around the project highlighted a risk: rather than valuing and explaining this heritage, the architectural solution may end up making it even less visible.

As a closed and discreet site, this cemetery nevertheless retains exceptional historical value, not only as a physical trace of the Jewish return to Lisbon in the 19th century, but also as a material marker of a city in which the normalization of modern Jewish life had to be built step by step, even before the formal abolition of the Inquisition in 1821.

A rare piece of Jewish material culture was recovered in Lisbon during the archaeological works carried out between 2014 and 2016 on the riverfront plot formerly occupied by the Armazéns Sommer, at Rua do Cais de Santarém (today integrated into the Áurea Museum by Eurostars). The object is a circular ceramic stamp, preserved as a fragment, whose reconstruction suggests an original diameter of about 9 cm and an average thickness of roughly 1.5 cm. It was found in deposits dated to the transition from the 4th to the 5th century CE, within a late Roman urban setting close to a narrow street leading to a fountain and cistern, near the line of the Roman wall.

The stamp’s significance lies in its iconography. On the working face, the authors identify a schematized menorah, originally with seven branches, and, beside it, a lulav motif associated with Jewish ritual practice. While the menorah could, in certain contexts, be ambiguously adopted, the lulav is understood as a distinctly Jewish symbol, strengthening the interpretation that the stamp belonged to a Jewish user or a Jewish-controlled context. The stamp is therefore discussed as a practical instrument for marking perishable goods, plausibly bread. In particular, the study argues that it could have been used to imprint unleavened bread, mazzah, functioning as a visible kosher identifier for goods produced outside the household, where communal or commercial production required clear signals of ritual compliance.

Beyond the object itself, the stamp contributes to broader discussions about Jewish presence in late Roman Olisipo. Direct archaeological indicators of Jewish life in the far western provinces are scarce, and this piece stands out for linking symbolic language, ritual practice, and everyday provisioning within an urban context on Lisbon’s Tagus waterfront.

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.