The Cinema Queue Was for Portuguese ID Cards

On 28 November 2025, Portugal’s embassy in Israel booked about 5,000 citizen-card and passport slots at a Ramat Hasharon cinema. The walk-in ran from 09:00 to midday at Cinema City Glilot, under the name “Old times are back.”

Clips of the line were sold as a rush for new EU passports. The embassy’s own checklist asked for a Portuguese birth certificate. That paper means nationality is already on the civil register. The scramble was for identity documents, and Lisbon closed the Sephardic nationality clause six months later.

A Friday Queue at the Glilot Ticket Booths

The Portuguese Embassy in Tel Aviv did not open its HaArba Street tower that morning. It sent consular staff to the ticket booths at Cinema City Glilot, at Glilot Junction in Ramat Hasharon, and told people to queue the way they would at an airport check-in. A line ran from the complex entrance down into the underground car park. Some arrived before dawn. Others turned around when they saw the wait.

The embassy had billed the day as open to Portuguese citizens, including first-time citizen cards and renewals, and first-time passports and renewals, without the Chave Móvel Digital login that now gates the online calendar. Slots handed out on the pavement were for December (citizen cards) and January (passports). You could book only for yourself. Staff assigned dates at random. If you could not take those months, you had to wait for later online openings.

A first-time Cartão de Cidadão required an Israeli passport and a Portuguese birth certificate. A renewal needed the old card. A passport required a valid Portuguese citizen card. The embassy said you could not file for a card and a passport at the same time. Children under 12 were told to wait for online family slots. No extra place was given for disability. The notice even said there was no need to arrive too early, with plenty of slots. The car park said otherwise.

The Embassy Booked 5,000 Slots in Three Hours

After the event, the embassy told fact-checkers it had run a day to assign in-person bookings for citizen cards and passports to people who already held Portuguese nationality, because online slots were scarce and bot farms were grabbing them to resell. It was the fourth time the mission had used the “Old times are back” format. Staff said they served about 5,000 people: 4,000 for the citizen card and 1,000 for the passport. A Facebook follow-up said thousands of Portuguese-Israeli citizens got into the consular section and that no one was left without service.

THE GLILOT BOOKING DAY

• The headcount: The embassy said it served about 5,000 people on 28 November 2025.
• Citizen cards: About 4,000 of those bookings were for the Cartão de Cidadão.
• Passports: About 1,000 bookings were for passports, in January slots.
• The series: Embassy staff said this was the fourth “Old times are back” queue.

Those figures describe appointments, not new grants of nationality. A Portuguese birth certificate is issued after the registry has already recorded you as Portuguese. The cinema was the last practical mile of a wave that had been processed in Lisbon, often by lawyers, for years.

WHAT YOU NEEDED IN THE LINE

• First citizen card: An Israeli passport plus a Portuguese birth certificate.
• Card renewal: The old Cartão de Cidadão, or the first-time file if the card was lost.
• Passport: A valid Portuguese citizen card, and not on the same visit as a first card.
• Age floor: Twelve or older; younger children were pointed back to later online family slots.

The embassy had tested the same idea earlier in 2025, including a citizen-card-only queue at Cinema City Jerusalem on 8 August. Glilot was the version opened to the whole country, for cards and passports, after bot traffic kept eating the calendar.

How Bot Farms Captured Consular Appointments

Portugal’s consular booking site was built so a citizen could pick a day from a sofa. In Tel Aviv it became a market. The embassy said companies used bots to soak up openings and then sold those vacancies for large sums. A February 2025 trial, still called “Old times are back,” was launched at the embassy door for first-time identity cards, precisely to cut that resale. Glilot was the larger rematch.

To attend all Portuguese citizens without the interference of “bot farms”, and those that are having difficulties in booking with CMD, we will be repeating the project “old times are back” on Friday the 28th of November.

Embassy of Portugal in Tel Aviv, Instagram notice

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Online, the same video was treated as proof that Israelis were storming a European passport office. Some replies cast the line as a problem Portugal should refuse. The embassy’s English notice had already limited the day to citizen cards and passports, and to people who could show Portuguese civil-status papers. The fight on the pavement was with software that harvests public calendars, not with a one-day naturalization desk.

By September 2026 the mission was still telling residents that the consular section still requires a booking, and that openings are announced on Facebook and Instagram. First-time cards for birth certificates issued through 2025 were being taken by email to citizencard@mne.pt, a quieter channel than a cinema forecourt.

Israelis Were 40 Percent of New Nationals in 2023

The reason a cinema in Ramat Hasharon can fill with Portuguese document traffic is older than the bots. Statistics Portugal (INE) recorded 41,393 acquisitions of Portuguese nationality in 2023. Israelis accounted for 16,377 of them, 40 percent of the total, and 24,408 of those 41,393 new nationals lived outside Portugal. In 2024 the INE count rose to 46,840 acquisitions, of which 17,647 were Israeli, 37 percent.

The Institute of Registries and Notaries (IRN) published a wider ledger on 5 July 2025. Between 2020 and 2025 its services took in more than 1.5 million nationality requests, a figure the institute put at more than 1.543 million. That pile is not only foreign naturalization. The IRN said 64 percent were attributions under article 1 of the Nationality Law, often birth records for children of Portuguese citizens born abroad; 27 percent were naturalizations under article 6; 9 percent were other routes.

2022 was the peak filing year, with 367,348 new processes, of which 124,663 cited article 6(7), the Sephardic-descendant clause. New filings then eased to 274,820 in 2023 and 277,656 in 2024, with 121,460 in the first half of 2025. The backlog did not ease with them. On 30 June 2025 the IRN still had 515,334 files under review. Sephardic naturalizations were 31 percent of that pending stock, ahead of five-year residence files at 20 percent.

NATIONALITY FILES AT THE IRN

Those rows are why a Tel Aviv consular calendar can look like a sold-out concert. Each approved Sephardic file in Lisbon eventually needs a citizen card and, for travel outside the EU, a passport. The Glilot queue was that downstream traffic, compressed into three hours because the online gate was broken.

Parliament Repealed the Sephardic Clause in May

Portugal opened the special route with the 2015 decree on Sephardic descendants, a naturalization path for people who could show belonging to a Portuguese Sephardic community after the Inquisition-era expulsions. It waived ordinary residence and language tests. From 2022 Lisbon demanded a present-day link to Portugal. After a 2023 plan to kill the policy on the ground that reparation had been “fulfilled,” the rules were tightened instead of abolished, including a three-year legal-residence condition for new files.

The clause did not survive the next overhaul. Organic Law 1/2026 of 18 May amended Nationality Law 37/81 and entered into force on 19 May 2026. Article 6(7), the Sephardic naturalization power, was revoked. Procedures already opened before that date keep the old wording. New Sephardic filings do not. The same law pushed ordinary naturalization residence to 10 years, or 7 years for EU and CPLP nationals, and created a discretionary route for great-grandchildren of origin Portuguese citizens who have five years of legal residence.

FROM RESTITUTION TO REPEAL

1. 2015: Decree-Law 30-A/2015 lets descendants of Portuguese Sephardic Jews naturalize without ordinary residence tests.
2. 2022: Rules add a present-day connection to Portugal, beyond ancestry papers.
3. 2023-2024: A plan to end the policy gives way to tighter terms, including three years of legal residence for new files.
4. 28 November 2025: The Tel Aviv embassy runs the Glilot booking day for people who already hold nationality.
5. 19 May 2026: Organic Law 1/2026 takes effect and repeals the Sephardic clause for new applications.

The cinema line sat in the gap between those last two dates. Dual nationals were still collecting cards and five-year passports. The legal door that had created most of that population was six months from being taken off the statute book. Pending Sephardic files remain a large share of the IRN’s 515,334-case pile; they are the part of the 2015 experiment that the 2026 law did not erase.

A Citizen Card Still Comes Before a Passport

For people already on the Portuguese register, the practical order did not change with the repeal. You obtain a citizen card first. Only then can you ask for a passport. Inside the EU and Schengen, the card is the travel document. The passport is for everywhere else. That is why 4,000 of the 5,000 Glilot slots were for the card.

Adult passports issued at those January appointments were still five-year books. A government dispatch of 3 December 2024 set up a working group for a 10-year passport, with a target of a new model from the second quarter of 2026, and later answers to parliament said the 10-year term would apply to citizens aged 25 or over. The new booklet was still being designed in May 2026. The Glilot cohort was never in that design.

Demand for a second European document among Israelis did rise after the 7 October 2023 attacks, for movement, for university fees as EU nationals, and for a hedge. The Glilot pictures got pulled into that story because a cinema forecourt looks like a border. The papers in people’s hands were the output of a decade-old restitution law, already narrowed, then repealed. What remains is a dual-national population that still has to beat bots, or stand in a line, every time a card or a five-year passport expires.

Frequently Asked Questions

Did the Cinema City event grant Portuguese citizenship?

No. The embassy limited the day to citizen-card and passport bookings for people who already held Portuguese nationality, and it barred a first card and a passport on the same visit because a passport file needs a valid Cartão de Cidadão. Nationality itself is decided by the IRN in Portugal, usually after a birth-certificate registration, not at a ticket booth in Ramat Hasharon.

How many foreigners acquired Portuguese nationality in 2024?

Statistics Portugal counted 46,840 acquisitions in 2024, and 17,647 of those people were Israeli, 37 percent of the total, after Israelis had already been 16,377 of 41,393 acquisitions in 2023. Those INE figures measure completed nationality, not consular appointments.

What is the Chave Móvel Digital the embassy kept mentioning?

It is Portugal’s mobile login, tied to a phone number and PIN, and the Tel Aviv mission says online consular vacancies only appear if you authenticate with it, preferably on a computer with a card reader rather than a phone. “Old times are back” was the workaround for people who could not get through that gate, or who were competing with bots that could.

Do Sephardic files submitted before 19 May 2026 still count?

Yes. Organic Law 1/2026 applies to procedures opened after it took effect, so a Sephardic file already started keeps the previous rules. New applications cannot use article 6(7). Under the 2026 text, nationality declarations made before diplomatic or consular agents must also be delivered in person, unless a lasting physical impossibility is proven.

Disclaimer: This article is news reporting on a completed consular event and on published changes to Portuguese nationality law. It is informational only and is not legal advice, an immigration consultation, or a determination of any person’s eligibility for Portuguese nationality, a citizen card, or a passport. Readers who need to act on a pending file or a document renewal should consult a lawyer admitted in Portugal, or the competent registry or consular post, before filing or travelling. Figures and procedures here follow the embassy, the IRN, Statistics Portugal, and the gazette texts as those sources stood on the dates cited, and later circulars can change how a live file is handled.

The Tel Aviv mission is still issuing cards and passports to people already on the Portuguese register. The cinema is no longer the method. The statute that produced most of those registers no longer takes new names.