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.

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.