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THE MISSION
The last generation of Moroccan Jews will take their stories with them.
Between the late 1940s and the 1970s, the Jews of Morocco — there for two thousand years — left. For Israel, for France, for North America. They carried what they could fit in a suitcase and what they could hide. The last people who remember the leaving firsthand are now in their seventies, eighties, and nineties. This book hopes to gather their small stories before they're gone.
My father passed away 13 years ago. He was born in Morocco in 1943 and raised in Rabat. By 1958 he, along with his entire family, had fled -- to France, to North America, and to Israel. A difficult confluence of events ultimately made it impossible for Jews to see a future in Morocco, in spite of hundreds of years of protection from Sultans and the French protectorate. These stories often echo the love and loss of leaving Morocco.
The anecdotes my father shared with our family, often around the Shabbat dinner table, stay with me. From bringing home someone else's pot of dafina on Saturday, to a famous story of an aunt that had currency rolled up in her hair to leave the country, his stories are all we have left of his firsthand experience of living in and leaving Morocco.
A small exchange on Instagram with another child of a Moroccan Jew sharing her father's story of smuggling currency out of the country in sardine cans inspired this effort to collect these anecdotes before they are lost to time.
If you are a Moroccan Jew that recalls leaving Morocco or are the child or grandchild of someone that left and have a story to share about leaving Morocco, what was left behind, what they did to leave (such as hiding currency), what recipes they brought that tied them to their home, please click on the link below and submit your story using our form.