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.

The Casa da Inquisição of Monsaraz is located at Travessa do Quebra-Costas 7, inside the walls of the medieval village. The building is known through local tradition as the “House of the Inquisition”. However, Monsaraz did not have its own permanent tribunal of the Holy Office. Inquisitorial cases connected to residents or natives of Monsaraz were mainly handled by the Tribunal of the Holy Office of Évora.

Casa da Inquisição and local tradition

The building has been described as a possible lodging place for a familiar of the Holy Office, or as a temporary place where accused persons may have stayed before being sent to trial in Évora. This interpretation is cautious. It separates the local name of the building from the existence of an actual inquisitorial court, which is not documented for Monsaraz.

The Casa da Inquisição was later requalified as the Centro Interativo da História Judaica and inaugurated on 16 July 2016. The centre presents the Jewish history of Monsaraz through documents, digital interpretation and thematic rooms.

Jewish history and exhibition

The exhibition includes areas dedicated to the history and heritage of Monsaraz, the so-called Religions of the Book, and Judaism in Monsaraz. The section on Judaism was developed from existing documents and artefacts connected to the Jewish presence in the village. The centre also includes a workspace for researchers and students.

Between 1553 and 1767, 86 inquisitorial proceedings were opened against residents or natives of Monsaraz. Of these, 77 were processed in Évora, 8 in Lisbon and 1 in Coimbra. The records show that 67 proceedings were related to accusations of Judaism, heresy and apostasy. The accused included 53 men and 33 women. Two men and one woman were sentenced to secular justice.

Inquisitorial records from Monsaraz

Some proceedings describe practices interpreted by the Inquisition as Jewish. These included sweeping the house from the street door inward, using a low table, avoiding pork, rabbit, hare and fish without scales, praying to Moses, and lighting a candle on Shabbat.

The Casa da Inquisição is therefore relevant not because it proves the existence of a tribunal in Monsaraz, but because it preserves the local memory of persecution and now functions as a documented interpretive centre for the Jewish history of Monsaraz.

Kehila Kedosha Janina, often abbreviated as KKJ, is one of the rarest and most living cases of Judaism on the Lower East Side: a Romaniote synagogue, linked to the Greek Jewish tradition and distinct from both the Ashkenazi and Sephardic worlds. The building itself, narrow and in a tenement-style format, was constructed in 1926–1927 for a community of Romaniote Jews originating from Ioannina, also known as Janina, in northwestern Greece.

The congregation was organized in New York in 1906, at a time when the neighborhood was dense with immigrant synagogues, almost all marked by different languages and rites. The impulse was clear: to preserve a specific liturgy and a communal culture developed in Greece over centuries. In 1927, the group opened its doors at the current address, consolidating on the city’s Jewish map a third, lesser-known identity strand, and for that reason all the more significant.

The building was designed by Sydney Daub and is immediately recognizable by the symbols on its facade: Stars of David, Tablets of the Law, and a cut-out arch suggesting an Orientalizing visual language, consistent with the Mediterranean origins of the community. It is also identified as the only surviving Romaniote synagogue in the Western Hemisphere with an active congregation.

Here the Torah is not a decorative detail, but memory carried in material form. KKJ preserves three Torah scrolls brought from Ioannina, and one of them, associated with the synagogue’s dedication in 1927, is described as housed in a heavy silver tik, a rigid case common in Mediterranean and Eastern traditions and distinct from the more widely known Ashkenazi imagery prevalent in New York.

Since 1997, the women’s gallery has housed a museum created to tell the story of the community and of Greek Judaism to an audience that, in most cases, had never heard of the Romaniotes. The space includes a library, gallery, and educational resources, and is described as containing the first Holocaust memorial in America dedicated to Greek Jews, as well as a community area on the lower floor inspired by a traditional Greek cafe.