The researcher who dug up forty forgotten rabbis
Cascais is home to the Avner Cohen Casa Chabad, opened in 2020 on land the municipality granted after an American researcher, Eli Rosenfeld, spent over a decade recovering the names of around forty forgotten Portuguese rabbis erased by the Inquisition, and settled in Cascais to build the country's first permanent Jewish community centre.
An American student recovered forty forgotten Portuguese rabbis
In 2006 an American student named Eli Rosenfeld arrived in Portugal. He came to research Judaism in the country during the 15th century. Portugal's Inquisition started in 1536. It forced Jews to convert or leave. Many rabbis vanished from the record entirely.
Rosenfeld looked for their names. He found around 40 rabbis who had lived and taught in Portugal before and during the Inquisition. History had mostly forgotten them. In 2018 he published what he found in a book called Vozes Judaicas de Portugal, "Jewish Voices from Portugal." Portugal's president and the mayor of Cascais both wrote parts of it.
A rabbi's name went over a doorway in Cascais
In 2010, Rosenfeld became Portugal's shaliach. This is the Chabad-Lubavitch emissary to the whole country. The role meant building a Jewish community center from nothing. Portugal had none. He settled in Cascais, where a sizable Jewish community already lived nearby.
Rosenfeld asked the mayor of Cascais for land. In 2016 the municipality agreed. They offered a plot in the Costa da Guia for almost no rent. The land had come to the city through a swap with the Catholic Church. Some residents wanted it kept as a park instead. Over a hundred people protested the plan in September 2017. They protested again in February 2018.
The building went ahead anyway. It opened in 2020. It sits less than a kilometer from where you stand. Its main hall is dedicated to Rabbi Isaac Aboab of Castile. He was a Jewish scholar who died in Porto. Five centuries after the Inquisition drove Portugal's rabbis into silence, one of their names sits over a doorway on this coast.
An earthquake and tsunami followed the court to Cascais
The royal court had planned a holiday at the coast, nothing more. King Joseph I's daughter wanted a day by the sea, so the household moved to Cascais. On the morning they arrived, an earthquake tore through Lisbon. The court, sheltering here rather than in the capital, survived the first shock. Then a tsunami came in off the bay and wrecked boats along the shore where they stood. Parish records afterward counted the dead at nearly a third of the town's people, one of the highest death tolls anywhere in the country. The people who ran from Lisbon found the disaster had followed them to Cascais anyway.
A king came to Cascais to die
Luís I of Portugal ruled from Lisbon for twenty-eight years. He did not die there. He died in Cascais in 1889, at the end of a reign that had watched the monarchy lose ground to republicans and to debt. The town had taken in a fleeing royal court on a bad day in 1755. It was still the place a king came to when his own story closed.
Forts along this shore were built to keep people out
Long before any of that, this stretch of shore was built to keep people out. King John II ordered the Torre de Santo António de Cascais raised in 1488 to guard the mouth of the Tagus River. More forts followed over the next two centuries. They ringed the bay with garrisons. These troops meant to stop ships, soldiers, and anyone else the crown did not want landing here. Troops held the line at Cascais on and off for nearly four hundred years, into the 1870s. The coastline's whole purpose, for most of its history, was refusal.
Disputed land became a Jewish community house
The land the municipality offered for the Chabad house had its own tangled past. Cascais had picked it up in a swap with the Catholic Church. Some residents wanted it kept as open parkland. They did not want it handed to a new religious building. More than a hundred people turned out to object in September 2017, and again in February 2018. The objections did not stop it. The Avner Cohen Casa Chabad opened in 2020, on ground that had been fought over twice before anyone broke soil.
The tower still faces the water, and less than a kilometer inland, a doorway now carries the name of a rabbi the Inquisition never managed to erase.
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