In Morocco, Exploring Remnants of Jewish History

The New York Times -   MAY 30, 2015

By MICHAEL FRANK 

Boy 1: “What are those two guys doing walking around here?”

Boy 2: “It’s obvious. They’re looking for the Jews.”

This exchange was translated from Arabic by Youness Abeddour, a guide and documentarian who agreed to share with me his knowledge of the mellah, the walled Jewish quarter, of Fez. Boy 2, though, was mistaken. Although as many as 240,000 Jews lived in Morocco as recently as the 1940s, only around 3,000 remain in the country today. Youness and I had not come to look for the Jews; we had come to look for the traces they left behind.

These traces, whether in buildings or objects, or less tangibly in music and stories and memory, were ubiquitous if sometimes elusive in the mellahs of Fez and, as I discovered later, Marrakesh. Some were easily found, others less so; but running like an electrical charge through this rich but disappearing heritage was a palpable sense of urgency about what will happen in the coming years to Morocco’s Jewish legacy.

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