Museum of the Holocaust offers free entrance until June

Celebrate the International Day of Museums with a visit to the Museum of the Holocaust, the first of its type in the Iberian Peninsula that keeps the memory of the victims of one of the darkest periods in Humankind’s latest history. Entrance is free until June.

The Museum of the Holocaust was scheduled to open on 27th January, the International Day of Commemoration in memory of the victims of the Holocaust. However, owing to the pandemic restriction measures, museums had to close doors.

The Mayor of Porto, Rui Moreira visited the museum, located at Rua do Campo Alegre, nearby the Kadoorie synagogue, at the invitation by Dias Ben Zion, the president of the Jewish community in Porto, who established the Museum of the Holocaust, where they recreated the dorms at Auschwitz Concentration Camp, a room with the name of the victims, a flame memorial, and also a cinema and a conference room and a study centre, in remembrance of their relatives that perished under the Nazi period.

Besides the Mayor of Porto, also the Councillor for Youth and Sports, Catarina Araújo joined the visit.

According to the organisers, the Museum of the Holocaust presents “Jewish life before the Holocaust, Nazism, Nazi expansion in Europe, ghettos, refugees, concentration camps, work camps, extermination camps, the Final Solution, the death marches, liberation, Jewish population in the post war, the foundation of the state of Israel, wining or dying of hunger, the Righteous Among the Nations”.

In 2013, the Jewish community in Porto shared the archive referring to the refugees that were en route in Porto with the Washington DC Holocaust Museum; now, the archive came back to Porto and includes the official documents, testimony, letters and hundreds of individual files, as well as the Sifrei Torá left behind by the refugees in the synagogue of Porto during World War II.

Like the Museum of the Holocaust in Washington DC, in the United States, the corridors of the building seek to tell the full story of pursuit, torture, and the killing of over six million people by Nazi Germany, by means of photographs and screens that display the events known as "Shoah" or "Final Solution".

The outline goal of the museum is to invest in teaching, educators’ professional training, the promotion of exhibitions and research. The first of such initiatives is scheduled for 20th September, targeted at professors; it will be attended by holocaust survivors and representatives of similar museums in the world.

The Museum of the Holocaust opens doors between 2.30 pm and 5.30 pm, every working day. It offers free entrance until June.