Esther Muchnik, one of the leading figures in the Israeli community in Portugal (she was vice-president of the Lisbon Israeli community), filed a complaint with the National Electoral Commission regarding anti-Semitic crimes. Last Sunday, as he exercised his right to vote in Miraflores (municipality of Oeiras), he heard the Section 17 commission member to whom he had given his citizenship card say: “I don’t like it!” When Esther asked him a question, he replied, “I don’t like the name and the fact that they commit mass murder.” “He realized that I was Jewish,” says Esther Muchnik. CM. “It was an act of hatred, blaming me for what is happening in the Gaza Strip,” he previously said in an opinion piece in Público. To the question CM Regarding the conflict in Gaza, Esther Muchnik expresses criticism of the government of Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel. A defender of two states, she, as a Jew, feels like a “hostage of war.”
The President of the Republic, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, and the Mayor of Lisbon, Carlos Moedas, have already called him, expressing their solidarity.
“I am afraid that hatred of Israel will grow; Netanyahu will not put an end to Hamas,” he emphasizes. The daughter of Polish Jews, Esther Muchnik was born in Portugal. The Holocaust claimed the lives of members of his family.
“My mother’s cousins lived in Warsaw. We never heard anything more about them,” he says. CM.