An Israeli-owned restaurant in Lisbon announced Tuesday that it would close its doors after nearly a decade, citing harassment and vandalism in the wake of Israel’s war in Gaza.

In a post on Facebook, the owners of Tantura explained that they were forced to deal with “the war and the alarming rise in antisemitism in the world” over the past two years. “[We had] graffiti smeared on the restaurant walls, blackening its good name online, hostile campaigns and a full-on boycott,” the post reads.

The restaurant was founded by Elad Bodenstein and Itamar Eliyahuo in 2017, serving hummus, sambusak and shakshuka in Lisbon’s main entertainment district. The place has won a raft of awards and has been ranked one of the city’s 10 best restaurants.

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The name Tantura was inspired by the beach where the owners met and later married. Along the beach, just south of Haifa in Israel’s north, once stood the Palestinian village of Tantura, also the site of a massacre of Palestinians during the 1948 War of Independence. Bodenstein and Eliyahuo say they were not aware of this historical association when they chose the name.

In December, they told Haaretz that turnout at the restaurant fell from 120 customers a day before the war to 20 during the fighting. “Solutions were suggested,” they wrote in the Facebook post.

The owners said they were advised to change the restaurant’s name, keep a low profile, hang a sign saying they “don’t support” the war in Gaza and to play down their identities. “All of this felt like a band-aid on a much deeper wound,” they wrote. “We’ve given up on Tantura, but not on ourselves.”

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Speaking with Israel’s Channel 12 on Thursday, Bodenstein and Eliyahuo said the harassment campaign began on October 8, 2023 – a day after Hamas’ surprise attack on southern Israel.

“It felt planned because it all began then. It started with online messages, later it was a protest outside of the restaurant, graffiti on the walls, showing a picture of us as the owner of a ‘Zionist business,’ it was all over the place,” Eliyahuo told the outlet.

When asked whether they received support from the Israeli community in Lisbon, Eliyahuo told Channel 12 that some Israelis “developed a different kind of fear,” explaining that they didn’t come to the restaurant due to fears that it would be targeted because of its Israeli identity. “I can understand them,” Eliyahuo said, with Bodenstein adding that “we’re not judging anybody.”

The European Jewish Congress said it was “deeply concerned” by the closure of the restaurant.

“That a cultural and culinary space dedicated to bringing people together has been driven out of business by hate is a troubling reflection of the climate facing Jewish and Israeli life in parts of Europe today,” the EJC said in a statement on social media.

Regarding the actions that led to the closure, the EJC said it was “far beyond political expression.”

“When antisemitism manifests in a way that silences livelihoods and erases Jewish presence from public life, it must be recognized for what it is: discrimination with real and damaging consequences. The European Jewish Congress expresses its full solidarity with the owners of Tantura and with the Jewish community of Lisbon,” the statement said.