Captain Artur Carlos de Barros Basto was instrumental in reviving the Jewish community
in the region near Porto, Portugal. Although he was raised Catholic, he discovered
that his family had Jewish origins, so he converted. He realized that there were
cryptoJews in the Porto region that were still in hiding from the days of the Inquisition.
In 1923 he founded a Jewish learning center and in 1929 built the massive Porto Synagogue.
He published a periodical for the Porto Jewish community from 1927 to 1958 called
Ha-Lapid. Several issues of Ha-Lapid have a record of prayers and poems that were
circulating among the cryptoJews in the region. These communities had lost the typical
daily liturgy but developed their own prayers.
