Inside Roman Abramovich’s quest for portuguese citizenship — an all-access pass to EU

Vanity Fair has published an article arguing that even amid sanctions, Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich found a path through his Sephardic heritage—but the country’s well-intended policy may now be history as a result. Caliber.Az reprints the article.

As Rabbi Daniel Litvak stepped out of the cab at the airport in Porto one Thursday morning last March, a cluster of plainclothes Portuguese cops swarmed him. His son, Malkiel, watched in shock as more than a dozen men halted traffic, seized bags, and bundled his father into a vehicle, speeding off without explanation. To Malkiel, it looked like a kidnapping.

The officers were from a branch of the federal Polícia Judiciária. They drove Litvak three hours south to their headquarters in Lisbon, where they booked him, photographed him, and placed him in a cell for the night, according to Litvak, alongside a man from Pakistan arrested for attempted murder and a local arrested for armed theft. The eventual charges against Litvak included document forgery, influence peddling, and money laundering—and he was arrested, he was told, based on an anonymous tip that he was trying to leave the country.

The next morning, the Lisbon team expanded their dragnet in Porto, searching several properties, including the city’s Kadoorie Mekor Haim Synagogue, named for a wealthy Jewish dynasty whose family members had helped fund the synagogue’s completion in the late 1930s, just before thousands of Jewish refugees began passing through neutral Portugal as they fled Nazi persecution. After the war, the country’s fascist dictatorship supported a policy known as “Re-Christianization” that left little room for minority religions. The building fell into disrepair until this century, when legislation to offer citizenship to those with Portuguese Jewish descent accelerated the revival of the Jewish community. The Comunidade Israelita do Porto is now 1,000 strong, with a headquarters and a small museum sitting catty-corner to the synagogue’s front gate.

Yoel Zekri, a young French Israeli dentist who moved to the city in 2015, was in the synagogue that Friday, working to prepare the Shabbat meal. Around 9 a.m. several dozen officers showed up, some of them armed, and some of them climbed the stairs to the entrance. Zekri’s polite greeting—“Oui, bonjour?”—was rebuffed with a stern response—“Search warrant”—as officers barged in brandishing a clutch of documents. (The Portuguese attorney general’s office, which oversees the judicial police, told Vanity Fair that magistrates are not allowed to comment on specific cases, and the investigations “are covered by legal secrecy.”)

The day Litvak was arrested, Boris Johnson’s government had imposed a travel ban and asset freeze on Abramovich—by then already a Portuguese citizen.

Zekri spotted a highly recognizable name on the papers mentioned as probable cause, though the person had never set foot in the synagogue. It belonged to a Jewish man who had recently been granted Portuguese citizenship: Roman Abramovich.

The day of Litvak’s arrest in March 2022—14 days into Russia’s war in Ukraine—Boris Johnson’s government had imposed a travel ban and asset freeze on Abramovich, known as “Putin’s wallet,” and his estimated $12 billion. The European Union followed suit five days later. But Abramovich was ahead of the game. In July 2020, the oligarch had certified his heritage as the descendant of Jewish people long ago expelled from Portugal; by the following April, he had consequently gained Portuguese citizenship—and thereby the possibility of lifelong residency in the European Union, as well as the ability to challenge European sanctions imposed on him. (A spokesperson for Abramovich said he did not “wish to comment” for this story.)

Abramovich, who grew up an orphan in Russia’s frozen north, made the bulk of his fortune buying a state-owned energy conglomerate from the Yeltsin-era Russian state on the cheap before selling it back to a Putin-led government a decade later for more than 50 times the value of his original stake. Thrice married with seven kids, his life has been unfailingly colourful, his $350 million Boeing 787 Dreamliner the stuff of legend. But the global reaction to the war in Ukraine severely hampered his ability to flit between mega-yachts and luxurious properties like the Château de la Croë on France’s Cap d’Antibes; in April 2022 French authorities froze the villa that had been home to royalty from Britain, Belgium, Italy, and Egypt, as well as Aristotle Onassis and Stavros Niarchos. Abramovich had acted as an occasional mediator between the Kremlin and Kyiv, even suffering a bout of suspected poisoning there, as The Wall Street Journal reported. At the Ukrainians’ behest, the US did not sanction him, despite demands from some members of Congress.

Abramovich’s unlikely citizenship from a small, sunny Western European nation like Portugal had been public knowledge before Putin initiated his campaign. But the extraordinary details behind Abramovich’s citizenship application and its approval by Portuguese authorities, many never previously reported, reveal unsettling truths about the allure of wealth, the promise of nationality, and the strength of nationalism. At a time of deep political agitation between Russia and the West, Abramovich’s rapid procurement of European Union citizenship has caused embarrassment for authorities in Portugal, according to current and former politicians. But Litvak’s story also raises serious questions about the fairness of the country’s justice system and the powerful persistence of antisemitism, particularly in Europe.

Litvak, 63, grew up 9,000 miles from Abramovich, though around the same time, in Buenos Aires, his grandparents having fled Europe in the early 20th century. As a young man, he had moved to Israel to finish his rabbinical studies. He began working in Porto in 2007 and has been the rabbi there ever since. His wife, Ruth, and his six children live full-time in Israel, where he had been heading before his arrest. Over the years, his role and responsibilities in Porto expanded considerably, mirroring the growth of the community he serves, in the city where his Jewish faith had—long ago—been almost entirely obliterated.

By the late 1400s, what was once a patchwork of fiefdoms across the Iberian peninsula had narrowed through centuries of conflict and compromise to just two major powers: the Kingdom of Portugal and the combined kingdom of Castile and Aragon, precursor to modern Spain. In 1492, the rulers of the latter, Ferdinand and Isabella, issued an edict calling for the expulsion of their country’s hundreds of thousands of Jewish residents. Many sought refuge to the west, where a Portuguese king promised them protection. But just four years later, a new king ordered an expulsion, part of a prenup with his wife, Ferdinand and Isabella’s daughter. Historians say that while a small number of expulsions were carried out, King Manuel did not want successful Jewish people to abandon his economy, so he forcibly converted them to Christianity, though some maintained their faith in private, particularly in the country’s more remote regions. Those families became known much later as “crypto Jews,” or by the Hebrew term Bnei Anusim (roughly “descendants of forced ones”).

Abramovich’s global travel on a $350 million Boeing 787 Dreamliner is the stuff of legend. but the Russian invasion of Ukraine severely hampered his ability to flit between mega-yachts and luxurious properties.

Elsewhere over the centuries, the Roman Catholic Inquisition hunted down any conversos perceived as insincere. Porto’s old walled Jewish neighbourhood became known as Vitória, or Victory—alluding to Christianity’s conquest of the heretical Judaic faith. Hundreds of Jewish families understandably fled elsewhere, either to more welcoming cities in Northern Europe like Antwerp and Amsterdam or to existing communities in the Ottoman Empire and North Africa. They became known as the Sephardim, after the Hebrew word for the Iberian peninsula, Sefarad.

Fast-forward five centuries or so. Successive financial crises left tiny Portugal on its knees—no longer able to exploit the wealth of former colonies, instead reliant on an almost $100 billion bailout from the European Union and the International Monetary Fund in 2011. Desperate for foreign investment and with an ageing population, politicians turned their focus to immigration policy. In 2012 the government in Lisbon introduced a program that offered residency permits to wealthy foreigners if they invested more than $600,000 in property. (More than 5,000 Chinese applicants and over 500 from the US have obtained these so-called “golden visas.”)

The Russian billionaire reportedly owns this $9.3 million villa in the country’s Algarve region. 

The head of Parliament’s foreign affairs committee, José Ribeiro e Castro, envisioned a similar program that might generate not just investment but goodwill. He’d been contacted on Facebook several years earlier by a Jewish man in New York, where the oldest Sephardic community in the US had been founded in the 1650s. The man, a stranger, had asked if any statutes might offer him and his community citizenship, Ribeiro e Castro recounted in his Lisbon office. The politician consulted the law book and indeed discovered an avenue, but it was convoluted and untested.

As Spanish authorities began to develop a similar “law of return,” several Portuguese lawmakers from the Socialist Party proposed legislation. Ribeiro e Castro—a Christian Democrat—heartily endorsed the “process that honors Portugal,” as he put it in an op-ed at the time. “It was a symbolic reparation,” he said to VF, and a way to restore “the composition of the national tissue of the country.”

In early 2015 Portugal rolled out the pathway to naturalized citizenship. In short: just a clean criminal record and proof of Sephardic ancestry, which would typically require authentication by boards representing either of the country’s two largest Jewish communities, in Lisbon and Porto. Only once Sephardic heritage had been certified could a person apply for citizenship.

For the volunteer board members in both communities, this represented a big responsibility. Israeli authorities had developed vast government departments over decades to determine Jewish descent, but there was no recognized legal or scientific standard for affirming specifically Sephardic ancestry as distinct from, say, Ashkenazi, Mizrahi, or Ethiopian Jewish backgrounds. Plus, the Portuguese communities were being given just months to set up their systems.

The government provided no formal estimate for the number of people worldwide who might qualify, and the new regulations were vague about the threshold to prove a person’s Sephardic roots, giving community leaders significant discretion. In Lisbon, the board began hiring graduate students and PhDs to trawl through archives from the Inquisition and compare their findings with applicants’ family trees. “It’s the biggest history lab in Portugal, bigger than the universities,” said José Ruah, the treasurer and longtime board member of the Lisbon community, whose own family returned to Portugal from North Africa around the same time the Inquisition finally sputtered in the 1820s. In Lisbon, people requesting Sephardic certification did not need to identify as Sephardic Jews, only prove a link to family who once had been, which could take months or years.

Porto’s leaders chose to interpret the new law’s criteria rather differently. Applicants would have to identify as Jewish or be the child of a Jewish parent and provide an attestation from their local rabbi that they “had a tradition of belonging to a Sephardic community of Portuguese origin,” alongside evidence that might include the etymology of their surname, the use in their family of a language called Ladino (largely derived from Old Castilian Spanish and Portuguese), or other proof of direct descent. Final approval of all applicants would fall to Litvak and people working directly for him—and decisions would be made with minimal delay.

The Kadoorie Mekor Haim Synagogue in Porto is one of the biggest synagogues in Europe. 

In the eyes of the state, at least publicly, neither community’s approach was necessarily more correct than the other, and for the first few years not a single official raised a red flag or published any complaints. Just 466 applications were logged in 2015, the first year of the program. By 2020, though, that number hit 34,876. The Sephardim had been the world’s first truly global Jewish community, ending up everywhere, from Libya to London, Hamburg to Mexico City. Folders filled with multilingual marriage certificates and photo albums flooded in from all corners.

By far the largest surviving number of Sephardim can be found in Israel. A bustling avenue to Portuguese citizenship rapidly developed there, with several corporations springing up to service the interest. “It was like a factory: 100 clerks, telephones,” recalls Leon Amiras, the vice president of the Israeli Bar Association, who was initially skeptical about having non-lawyers involved. He had personally helped a couple hundred Sephardim apply, following word-of-mouth referrals, from his office opposite the Waldorf Astoria in Jerusalem. But the more he saw of the larger operators, the more he grew to admire their seriousness and professionalism. They were, he says, “‘tak, tak, tak,’ first stage, second stage.…” He trails off to pull out his phone and show me several slick commercials produced by one such firm, called Portugalis.

Like Litvak, Amiras was born in Argentina. His grandparents had fled türkiye during an early 20th-century conflict with Greece, and he successfully gained Spanish and Portuguese citizenship thanks to Sephardic ancestors in both his parents’ families. But he told me his Portuguese certification from the community in Porto required far less documentation than the endless back-and-forth with the designated Jewish community in Spain. “The difference between the Portuguese procedure and the Spanish procedure is like when you have two girlfriends,” he explained with a hint of mischief. “One says ‘I really love, love you, want to be with you.’ The other says, ‘I’m not sure if I want you, if you want to be with me, I want flowers, I want a Rolex, I want this, I want this, I want this.’”

The subsequent deluge of citizenship and passport requests—the latter as proof of the former—began to outpace Portugal’s poorly staffed civil service, and delays mounted. By June 2020, foreign minister Augusto Santos Silva appeared before Parliament to ask for change. “There are an increasing number of people who come to that consulate,” he said, quoting a telegram from Portugal’s ambassador to Israel, “both to prepare applications and to collect their citizen cards or passports, who manifest complete ignorance about Portugal, its culture and history, even declaring they have no intention of visiting our country.” Israeli firms, he told lawmakers, had been advertising Portuguese citizenship applications during Black Friday sales. Such “prostitution,” he called it, of the country’s nationality “damaged Portugal’s international reputation.” Another lawmaker proposed adding a two-year residency requirement. Various Jewish communities began to worry that the right of return wouldn’t last much longer.

On July 16, 2020, an applicant with the Hebrew name of “Nachman ben Aharon” emailed the Porto community. “Dear Community,” he wrote in English. “I am a Sephardic Jew member of Sephardic community. Rabbi Boroda interviewed me and attested my Sephardic origin. Thank you, Roman.” Attachments included a birth certificate, a PDF file entitled “Letter from the Rabbi,” copies of Russian and Israeli passports, and a Microsoft Word document entitled “Roman Abaramovich [sic] Family tree.” It included two parents, Irina and Arkadiy, born in the USSR, and four grandparents, born in the “Russian Impire [sic].” One hour and 53 minutes later someone responded, “Shalom. Approved” and requested some information be sent in a different format.

Four days later, a SWIFT payment receipt shows Abramovich instructed his bankers at UBS in Switzerland to pay a “charitable contribution” of 250 euros to the Jewish Community of Porto’s account at the local subsidiary of Spanish banking giant Santander. It was the standard processing fee, which, multiplied across tens of thousands of applicants over several years, has helped Porto’s Jewish community accomplish a great deal, including feature films about Judaic history in Portugal, a moving Holocaust museum, and tours for schoolchildren. A few weeks later, Abramovich supplied the reformatted information and proof of payment. He also wrote, “I plan to donate you [sic] on the permanent basis for the long term.” His application was immediately passed to the Porto community’s back office. Gabriel Senderowicz, the community’s current president—using the pseudonym Berel Rosenstein, as he commonly did to avoid hassle from pushier applicants, he explained to me—alerted other members of the “support committee.” He suggested the group send an email of thanks, which was duly written and dispatched. (“Those who doubt Abramovich’s Sephardic origins do not know the law, do not know the case, or do not know both,” Senderowicz told VF.)

King João I established the city’s Jewish quarter in 14th-century Porto. His successors’ enforcement of the Inquisition led to the murder or expulsion of many Jewish citizens.

Abramovich’s “Letter from the Rabbi” had been written by Alexander Boroda, the head of the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia. In 2018 Boroda had officially recognized Abramovich for two decades—and half a billion dollars—of contributions to the federation. The two men have been close for many years: They were photographed enjoying lunch together at Basil Pizza & Wine Bar in Brooklyn back in 2013. Boroda wrote in the certification letter that his friend’s heritage was “based on my acquaintance with Roman Abramovich testimonies and a personal interview that I conducted.” He added the billionaire “preserves Sephardic rituals, lifestyle, traditions and food customs.” When asked what food customs distinguish a Sephardic family in Russia, he told VF, speaking from a rowdy restaurant in Rome, “I don’t know exactly.” Boroda added that he’d offered Sephardic assurance for “20, 30, not more” Russian Jewish people seeking Portuguese citizenship, and noted that a 23andMe test had put his own genetic heritage at 0.6 per cent Spanish and Portuguese. Boroda did not mention something that Senderowicz did, however: that he sought Porto’s Sephardic certification for himself, just a few months after Abramovich. When asked about this later, a representative said Boroda was on a “personal holiday” and unable to comment.

In a memorandum to the board, a member stated that the certification of Abramovich’s Sephardic roots from Boroda was “reliable.” The note went on to say that though the Porto community had “always been quite averse to accepting such cases, fundamentally because of the difficulty of treatment,” Abramovich was not only deserving of a certificate thanks to his community of origin, but also because he was rich enough to buy citizenship elsewhere and was instead choosing to become part of a “small dignified country unfortunately on the brink of bankruptcy.”

In August 2020, the Porto community wrote to the prime minister’s office saying that Roman Abramovich was an example of a Sephardic Portuguese Jew who would “try to mobilize to help Portugal.” By early September Abramovich was emailing a member of the Porto board that he had “heard many good things about your community from Rabbi Boroda,” adding that he planned to “become a member of your community and participate in all activities.”

On October 14, 2020, Abramovich filed his application for Portuguese citizenship at the Conservatória dos Registos Centrais in Lisbon, where it sat, unprocessed, for several months, along with thousands of others.

Whatever the motivation, Abramovich’s desire for Portuguese citizenship emerged against the background of some very specific geopolitical circumstances. In early 2018, two Russian military officers posing as tourists attempted to poison a former Russian spy in the English cathedral city of Salisbury, cratering the UK government’s relationship with Moscow. Abramovich—whose British investor visa was already facing scrutiny—withdrew his visa renewal request after the original expired that May. The same month, on a visit to Moscow, Litvak learned from Russia’s chief rabbi, Berel Lazar, that Abramovich might have Sephardic heritage. At the end of May, Abramovich jetted to Tel Aviv after Israel confirmed his eligibility for citizenship. Almost overnight, he went from Britain’s 13th wealthiest resident to Israel’s richest citizen (he is now second to the late casino tycoon Sheldon Adelson’s wife, Miriam). Abramovich continued to pursue residency options in Europe.

In September of that year, a court in Lausanne, Switzerland, directed the release of a police report that had blocked Abramovich’s two-years-long attempt to set up residence in Verbier. Local officials had described him as “a very attractive taxpayer for the community” and approved his application, but the police ultimately decided his presence would constitute a reputational risk—and potential security risk—for Switzerland, citing 1990s-era allegations of money laundering as well as alleged ties to criminal organizations. Abramovich’s Swiss lawyer issued a response insisting that “Mr. Abramovich has submitted to numerous, thorough background checks by government and business partners over the years and such unsubstantiated allegations have never been at issue.”

In February 2021, a Porto board member wrote to Maria de Lurdes Serrano, the head of the central registry office in Lisbon, requesting a “declaration of urgency” for processing Abramovich’s application, invoking reasons this was in the national interest including “Portuguese Jewish diplomacy in the world,” “recovery of the national economy,” and the “prestige of Portuguese State institutions.” Nothing about the letter was illegal, nor is there any evidence of a financial quid pro quo involving the Porto community. But perhaps fearing that perception, the letter stated: “Given the brutal increase of anti-Semitism in Europe and the certainty that the following information would cause headlines and outcry against Jews, as taught by Jewish history in European territory, we ask Your Excellency to take all measures so that said information never falls into the public square.”

Within days, Lurdes Serrano wrote back, assuring that the Abramovich application would “not take more than 10 months.” She soon instructed a staff member on the fourth floor, where some Sephardic nationality applications were handled, to “place this urgent request in the process…and follow along its processing, so as not to exceed the period of 10 months.” Ten months is the statutory minimum—so her reiteration of that time frame, and the fact she copied two central registry office board members, struck at least one person with related experience as a sign that Lurdes Serrano understood her correspondence might be examined in the future. Both the country’s intelligence service and the Polícia Judiciária—who are still investigating Litvak and several other members of Porto’s Jewish community—confirmed in response to her that they had no opposition, “nada consta,” to Abramovich’s application. Normally, clerks wait several weeks or even months for a police response; Abramovich’s case was actioned within just 24 hours. A spokesperson for the Polícia Judiciária did not answer VF’s questions about the timing.

Usually, as Portugal’s citizenship application portal makes explicit, candidates can expect to wait 24 to 29 months, but Abramovich waited only nine weeks from the February date the Porto board flagged his application for Lurdes Serrano to the time he was granted a “naturalized citizen birth certificate” on April 30. A few weeks later, Lurdes Serrano confirmed to the board that Abramovich’s citizenship had been granted: “I inform you that the respective nationality registration has already been carried out.” A rare surviving billionaire from Russia’s “gangster capitalism” era who still retained a direct line to Vladimir Putin now possessed EU citizenship. Even his own local lawyer told VF she had been “surprised” at the speed. In response to questions from VF, the Portuguese government agency that oversees that central registry office said “disciplinary procedures” were ongoing.

Rabbi Daniel Litvak was arrested shortly after Abramovich’s Portuguese citizenship was recognised. 

At the end of that month, Abramovich visited Porto to watch his soccer team, Chelsea FC, clinch victory in the finals of Europe’s Champions League tournament, beating Manchester City, a team owned by the brother of Abu Dhabi’s ruler, who also happens to be the ruler of Dubai’s son-in-law. (This was before the UK government forced him to sell the club amid war-related sanctions.) On the pitch afterward, Abramovich waved to fans, hugged players, and posed with the trophy, though he did not mention his new citizenship.

Portugal had been left on its knees—no longer able to exploit the wealth of former colonies, reliant instead on a $100 billion bailout.

It was ultimately Alexei Navalny—the Russian opposition leader currently in a Siberian jail—who directed global attention to Abramovich’s citizenship in December 2021, shortly after the Portuguese press first confirmed it. He criticized Portuguese authorities for “carrying suitcases of money” and wrote on his Twitter account that the oligarch had “finally managed to find a country where you can give some bribes and make some semi-official and official payments to end up in the EU.” Santos Silva, the Portuguese foreign minister who back in 2020 had advocated for changes to the law, pushed back against Navalny’s claims in a press conference. “The idea that Portuguese public sector employees carry suitcases of money is insulting,” Santos Silva said, insisting the allegation was “not true. And as we all know, when criticism has no basis, it also has no pertinence.” (VF has seen no evidence that Porto’s board members or civil servants working in the Conservatória dos Registos Centrais received any payment beyond the standard processing fee.) A spokesperson clarified to VF that Santos Silva had not meant to imply that Abramovich’s application procedure was legal, however; around the time of Litvak’s arrest in March last year, Santos Silva asserted that action was needed to keep the law from being “manipulated”—pervertida. The Portuguese government, meanwhile, has acknowledged that Abramovich will not lose his nationality as a result of EU sanctions, nor can he be prevented from visiting Portugal (barring an extraordinary outcome from the Litvak investigation).

The day before Litvak’s arrest, President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa formally proposed a new set of regulations on Sephardic nationality: Applicants would have to prove inheritance of property or corporate shares in Portugal or show evidence of regular trips to Portugal throughout their lifetime to “demonstrate an effective and lasting connection.” David Mendoza, the London-based president of the Sephardic Genealogical Society, considers this an obscene undermining of the original offer; the Inquisition was efficient in its terrors. “My last living relative in Portugal was burnt alive in 1732, and they have an inventory of everything they confiscated from him,” he says. “How can we inherit property if everything was confiscated hundreds of years ago?”

Portugal has become a popular destination for a host of influential people, straining the housing market in a nation with one of Europe’s lowest average incomes. Tamir Dean Pardo, the former head of Mossad, is now a citizen thanks to his Sephardic heritage. Others have found nationality through different Portuguese immigration exceptions. The Aga Khan, the 49th hereditary head of the Shia Imami Ismaili Muslims and a billionaire, was granted citizenship even more quickly than Abramovich following an urgent request from Rebelo de Sousa. Two children of former Angolan strongman José Eduardo dos Santos are Portuguese on paper. They join various international boldface names who own Portuguese real estate, though some are already European or are simply foreign investors: Designer Philippe Starck and Fiat heir Lapo Elkann have purchased luxurious homes along the coast. Elkann, who converted to his father’s Judaic faith in 2009, reportedly recently played host, alongside his Portuguese wife, to Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez, while Madonna has a house near Lisbon.

Last September, six months after his arrest, Litvak won an appeal to lift some of the punitive measures against him: the confiscation of his passport, which rendered him unable to leave the country, and thrice weekly check-ins with the police. The judges heavily criticized the behaviour of the prosecutors and law enforcement. “What amounts, who paid, when, relating to which naturalization process?” they wrote in their decision, citing a lack of evidence. “There is nothing in the file that tells us that these payments were of criminal origin.” The judges concluded with a rhetorical question: “How does one defend oneself only from generalities?” The attorney general’s office said inquiries are ongoing, with “analysis of the extensive documentary compilation seized.”

In March, the Porto community board wrote a letter to Rebelo de Sousa requesting an apology for the raids and the arrest, which was forwarded to the prime minister’s office; at the time of publication, there has been no response from the prime minister or president.

Litvak invited me to his home in Ashdod, Israel, where he and his wife made a simple lunch of white rice and homemade meat dumplings, followed by instant coffee. “If they think that the work wasn’t right, they have the right to stop this: ‘We don’t want the law, we change it.’ It’s your country, do that if you want,” he told me in slightly hesitant English. He emphasized that the ultimate controversy was in the government’s own hands: “We didn’t give the nationality to Abramovich.”

On April 15 of this year, the Portuguese government announced plans to end the Sephardic nationality law altogether at the end of 2023. “The purpose of reparation,” the proposal declares, “is understood to have been fulfilled.”