St. Petersburg Seminary and Yeshiva

In the mountain villages of northern Portugal, behind closed doors and drawn curtains, families for centuries had been keeping secrets they could not fully explain. They lit candles on Friday evenings without knowing why. They avoided certain foods. They murmured prayers in garbled fragments of a language their grandparents' grandparents had once spoken freely. They were Catholic and yet something older and half-remembered persisted in their homes like an ember that had never quite gone out.

These were the descendants of Portugal's forcibly converted Jews, the Crypto-Jews or Marranos, whose ancestors had been given a stark choice during the Inquisition: convert, flee, or die. Most converted. And across the generations, what remained of their Jewish identity retreated inward, encoded in ritual fragments and hushed family customs, stripped of its name and its structure but never entirely extinguished.

It was into this world that Captain Arturo Carlos de Barros Basto stepped in the 1920s, bearing a conviction that would define — and ultimately destroy — his military career: that these hidden communities deserved to come home.

Arturo Carlos de Barros Basto was born on December 18, 1887, in Amarante, Portugal. Raised within Catholic society, he came to believe that his own family descended from forcibly converted Jews. As a young man he pursued a military career and distinguished himself in the Portuguese army, eventually attaining the rank of captain.

His return to Judaism was neither symbolic nor private. In 1920, Barros Basto traveled to Tangier, Morocco, where he formally converted before a recognized rabbinical court and adopted the Hebrew name Abraham Israel Ben-Rosh.

Upon returning to Portugal, he married Lea Azancot, a member of a prominent Sephardic Jewish family in Lisbon, placing his personal religious commitment firmly within established Jewish communal structures.

By the mid-1920s, Barros Basto began articulating a broader vision. He maintained that the descendants of Portugal's Crypto-Jews constituted a dispersed yet continuous fragment of the Jewish people. Their situation, in his view, was not the result of voluntary assimilation but of historical coercion.

This conviction took institutional form in what he called the Obra do Resgate ("Work of Redemption"), an organized effort to reconnect families of Crypto-Jewish descent with structured Jewish education and communal life. The initiative combined outreach, instruction, and the gradual rebuilding of public Jewish presence in northern Portugal.

In 1927, he founded Ha-Lapid, a newspaper intended to give voice to this mission. The inaugural issue articulated its purpose in explicit terms: "Our Community has just lit up this small flare… and with our effort we will soon bring redemption to thousands of Portuguese… who live a spiritual life with vague reminiscences of their ancestors' religion."

The imagery running through Lapid ("The Torch") was telling. Barros Basto returned again and again to the metaphor of light and rekindling — a flame not newly lit, but reignited after having been suppressed. He did not imagine himself creating Jewish identity anew; he believed he was helping restore an interrupted inheritance.

Barros Basto's program did not remain confined to print or theory. Beginning in the 1920s, he undertook journeys throughout northern Portugal, seeking out families who preserved vestiges of Jewish practice within their homes. Many of these communities lived in rural areas where traditions had been transmitted privately across generations, often stripped of formal rabbinic structure, but retaining identifiable ritual traces.

Some families welcomed the possibility of structured reconnection; others hesitated, shaped by centuries of caution and fear. The legacy of the Inquisition had not disappeared from communal memory, and public identification carried real social and economic risks. Barros Basto's efforts required patience, negotiation, and sustained engagement.

Read the full article: https://aish.com/captain-arturo-barros-basto-and-the-reawakening-of-portuguese-jewry/

Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, observed each year on the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the most notorious of the German N**i death camps. http://www.wcvb.com/article/holocaust-remembrance-day-2026/70161277

Clever Rabbi Saved Thousands
Took advantage of a loophole

Rabbi Reuven Israel Kott was a Torah prodigy whose cleverness and chutzpah saved thousands of Jews from annihilation by the N**is.

Born in a Polish shtetl in 1897, Reuven was one of fifteen children. His family were Hasidic followers of the Ger Rebbe. Reuven’s exceptional intellect was apparent at a young age. He was a gifted scholar of Talmud and Jewish scripture, so precocious that he was given rabbinic ordination when only 17 years old.

The Rebbe took a special liking to Reuven, and every Friday night Reuven sat next to the great man at his festive Sabbath gathering. Small in size – he stood only 5’1” – Reuven was known for his big brain and his big heart.

Reuven was selected by his community to represent them as the Jewish voice on the local provincial council. When the Polish president died in the 1920’s, young Reuven stood at the graveside with other clergy and delivered a eulogy on behalf of the Jews of Poland.

Although life seemed fairly good for Polish Jews at the time, the Ger Rebbe sensed that big trouble was coming. He urged his followers to get out of Poland and move to Eretz Yisrael (the Land of Israel), at that time British Mandate Palestine. As the Rebbe’s right-hand man, Rabbi Reuven Kott threw himself into the mission of helping Jews leave Poland and return to their ancestral homeland.

The British had a quota system restricting the number of Jewish families they let in. Reuven took advantage of a bureaucratic loophole defining “family” as two parents and an undetermined number of offspring. Reuven collected money and bribed Polish authorities to get blank birth certificates. He would then “create” new families, matching people up, changing names and identities as needed. Every “family” had at least a dozen children.

Reuven told those he helped that they must stick with their fake identity. Most people complied, but a few didn’t and were caught. Under threat of being sent back to Poland, somebody gave Reuven’s name to the authorities.

Reuven and his brother were on a train in Warsaw when three plain-clothes officers approached. After verifying his identity, they arrested Reuven for bribery and forgery and threw him in jail. As a pious Jew, Reuven couldn’t eat the non-kosher jail food, so every day his daughter brought him a kosher meal – a two hour journey each way.

After several long months, his brother finally got word that there was going to be a hearing in the case. He went to visit Reuven in jail, told him the news and asked which lawyer he wanted to hire.

Reuven scribbled something on a scrap of paper, folded it up and slipped it through the bars of his cell. Outside the jail, Reuven’s brother unfolded the note. He was shocked to read the contents: “Hire me the most anti-Semitic lawyer in Warsaw!”

Reuven’s family was baffled. With so many top-notch Jewish lawyers, why would he want an anti-Semite? Had his incarceration led to a mental breakdown? Reuven’s brother assured them that he was of sound mind, and he went to Warsaw and found an attorney notorious for his fierce hatred of Jews.

The day of the hearing arrived, and the courthouse was packed with hundreds of Hasids from Reuven’s community. Reuven was allowed only three minutes with his lawyer, and then the hearing began.

To everybody’s shock, Reuven’s lawyer stood up, made a brilliant argument, and got the case dismissed.

Back home in the shtetl, everybody wanted to know what Reuven had said to his lawyer in those three minutes. Reuven said his Talmud study had taught him that in a business deal, if you get three “Yes” answers, the deal will close.

He asked his lawyer three questions:

– You hate us Jews, don’t you?

– Do you want to see me rot and die in jail?

– Would you like all of us Jews gone from Poland?

The lawyer answered yes to all three questions. Reuven immediately shot back, “What good would it do if one measly Jew rots in jail? If you set me free, I can get all the Jews out of Poland!”

Reuven got what he wanted by blinding the lawyer with his own hate. He continued his work “creating” large families and helping them move to Palestine. The anti-Semitic attorney even helped him procure more blank birth certificates. People often asked Reuven when he would go to Eretz Yisrael. He said, “I’m like the captain of a sinking ship. It is my responsibility to get all the passengers out before I get in the lifeboat.”

Over the course of 20 years, Reuven helped tens of thousands of Jews escape Poland. Today, almost half a million descendants of those Polish Jews owe their lives to Rabbi Reuven Israel Kott.

Unfortunately, Reuven himself never made it to Israel. He was murdered at Auschwitz in 1942.

This story was told by Reuven’s granddaughter, Ziporah Bank. She heard it from her mom – the daughter who brought kosher meals to Rabbi Kott in prison. See less

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