Virtual Memories from Morocco: From Local to Virtual Community

The story of the founding and development of a documentation group on Facebook, set up following a visit to a little museum in Fez, Morocco. The group succeeded in reuniting members of the city’s Jewish community scattered around the world and their descendants and was also an inspiration to their Muslim neighbors. The story focuses on the unique nature of culture and art as a means to link the past and the present and lay a foundation for building new communities and shaping their identity.

It all began in a little building in a distant corner of the Jewish cemetery, near the royal palace in Fez. The building was once used by the Em ha-Banim school, part of a Jewish educational network set up in 1912. Since there were no young people remaining in the Jewish community and schools were no longer needed, Edmond Gabbay, one of the last Jews in the city, had opened a museum there. The exhibits included Judaica, books, documents, objects, and family and historic photographs. All these exhibit items found their way there whenever one of the community members died or left the city. Gabbay’s little museum only tells a minuscule part of the community’s glorious history. The Jewish community of Fez is considered one of the most thriving Jewish centers in the world. Jews have lived in Fez since the 9th century, and throughout history the city has flourished and attracted great Torah scholars, such as Moses Maimonides, who lived in the heart of the Old City and studied at al-Quarouiyine University, believed to be the first university in the world. The regime's attitude to Jews changed from one dynasty to another, but the community remained active over the years through all its ups and downs. It began to decline in the late 1940s, in the context of Morocco’s developing struggle for independence and the Zionist activity in the kingdom. Many Jews emigrated to Israel, France, and Canada, and the Jewish population of Fez grew steadily smaller. The numbers speak for themselves: in 1947 there were 22,500 Jews living in Fez; by 1951 the number had gone down to 12,650 and by the 1970s to 1,000. Today only 50 Jews live in the city.

Edmond Gabbay at the entrance to his office near to the museum. Photo: Einat Levi

Emigration from Fez to Israel and other countries involved an experience of displacement and refuge, whether the decision to emigrate was made voluntarily or from compulsion, and whether it was accepted with happiness or sorrow. This complex experience had its influence not only on the first generation in Israel but also on subsequent generations, who experienced the deep rift between the Israeli experience and the past they had left behind. This rift can be better understood through the distinction proposed by the historian Dominick LaCapra in his book Writing History, Writing Trauma. LaCapra distinguishes between two types of trauma: firstly, trauma of loss, i.e. the loss of something from the past that no longer exists. This includes loss of community, home, familiar streets and landscapes, friends and childhood memories, and sometimes also family members scattered around the world. Secondly, trauma of absence – a kind of abstract sensation of something missing, sometimes expressed in a difficulty to describe what it is that is missing.

The distinction proposed by LaCapra is also relevant to the decline of the Fez community. The sensation of loss is mostly typical of the first generation, those born in Fez who emigrated to Israel or other countries. They left behind the familiar: home, friends, and community. The sensation of absence, on the other hand, is more typical of the second and third generations, Israeli-born Sabras and their children, for some of whom Fez is little more than a name. The sensations of loss and absence strengthen over the years as a consequence of the marginal position occupied by the heritage of immigrants from Arab and Islamic countries in the Israeli school syllabus and the Israel narrative in general.

I visited Edmond Gabbay’s museum for the first time in August 2013. Exposure to the wealth of heritage accumulated within the museum was a stark contrast to the sense of lack and absence that I had experienced up until then within my Moroccan identity. The short few minutes that I spent there made me realize that the best remedy for the sensation of “absence” is “presence”, and that the place to find “presence” is in Morocco and the memories of its natives, wherever they are. This realization had developed gradually by the time I came back to the museum three years later, in March 2016. This time I had four days to document the museum with a team of volunteers.

On the first day of the documentation project, we asked the obvious question: Where to begin? Everything seemed significant, urgent, and fascinating. Should we begin with the oldest photographs, or perhaps with the albums on the table? With the pictures on the walls, or perhaps the documents scattered around the rooms? We decided to split up: Ibtisam photographed the objects, while I photographed the photo albums. The encounter with the people whose faces appeared in the photos was emotional, instilling in me a deep sense of significance. Some of the photos showed families wearing their best clothes for the occasion. Others documented communal events, with the children’s faces glowing with joy.

Dedication ceremony of a Sefer Torah, Fez, 1950s. Photographer unknown.

By the second day we already had hundreds of photos but didn’t know the context or the stories behind them. I was turning over in my mind how to unpack the stories, locate the subjects and give them back their past. I was searching for a way to locate former residents of Fez, bring them together and use their help to “crowd-code” the questions of the photos documented in the museum. So on the second day of the documentation project, I started a Facebook group called “The Jewish Fes-book Project – documentation project for Jewish Fez”. Within two days 600 people had joined the group, and today it has over three thousand members. This increase was a reversal of the falling away of the Fez community. The photos documented in the museum were arranged in four albums: the first three were devoted respectively to pictures of children, women and men, and the fourth to group photos. Members of the Facebook group were requested to note the year and location where each photo was taken and tag people appearing. Whenever somebody was tagged the photo would appear on his or her own Facebook page, so awareness of the group’s existence spread like wildfire. Group members rapidly became active documenters, breaking out their own albums and scanning family photos, helping identify photos uploaded by other members, and sharing memories and stories from the past.

Another way to awaken memories was 360° virtual reality tours of Fez’s Jewish heritage sites uploaded to the group, including a tour of the Ibn Danan synagogue built in the 17th century in the Mellah (Jewish Quarter) of Fez. Since 1999 the synagogue has been designated as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO. Another virtual tour that the group members can take is of the Reuben ben Saadoun synagogue, on an upper floor of a building in one of the city’s streets. The synagogue was built in the 1920s and is considered to be one of the most beautiful and unique in the city. The virtual tours allowed members of the group to recall childhood memories connected to the synagogue: Torah reading, Bar Mitzva celebrations, weddings, parents and grandparents, the rabbis of the community and other communal events that had taken place there. As well as being religious centers, synagogues in Morocco were the heart of the community, the place where the family came together and experienced life cycle events and the cycle of the Jewish calendar.

The Jewish community of Fez succeeded in transforming itself from a declining local community to a renewed virtual community on Facebook and reuniting its members scattered around the world. Childhood friends and family members rediscovered one another after years of separation. The automatic translation feature allowed everyone to communicate, and the sharing of memories flowed naturally. The visual material, alongside the discourse surrounding each photo, sparked off a process of fruitful shared recall. The documentation materials uploaded to the group were available from anywhere at any time, and their accessibility assisted in their wide distribution and identification. The group also provoked interest among Muslim Moroccans from Fez with an interest in their city’s Jewish history. These included high school students who chose to write essays on Moroccan Jewish history and saw the group as a source of information, people from the film industry making movies on the subject, and academic researchers interested in the field.

The virtual space shared by Muslims and Jews created in the group around the topic of Moroccan Jews is a reminder that there is a heritage shared by all residents of Morocco, Jews and Muslims alike, and that the cultural and artistic dimension has a critical role to play. Both in the interpretation of the past that it enables by making it accessible, and in the opening of the door to new interpretations and new horizons of joint endeavors. Both of Jewish Morocco from the perspective of Jewish Peoplehood and of the Moroccan people in its own right.

Einat Levi is responsible for the economic and academic cooperation of the Israel mission to Morocco of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the State of Israel. Formerly a researcher at Mitvim institute and the Forum for Regional Thinking. She is also the founder of The Moroccan Jewish Story in 360, a digital project that combines documentation communities on Facebook and virtual tours of Jewish heritage sites in Morocco.?