Morocco Jewish Museum Reopens After Renovations
The Museum of Moroccan Judaism, one of the only institutions of its kind in the Arab world, was reopened in Casablanca after months of renovations.
The re-opening ceremony earlier this month was attended by Moroccan government officials, the museum’s president Jaques Toledano and Samuel Kaplan, the U.S. ambassador to Morocco and a past president of the Minneapolis Jewish Federation, according to the Moroccan news site LNT.ma.
A few dozen people attended the re-opening of the museum, whose halls were filled with the sound of violins and scent of incense and orange blossom. The museum, with a floor space of a few hundred square yards, features photos of synagogues from across the kingdom, Torah scrolls and Chanukah lamps, Moroccan caftans embroidered with gold; jewels ancient rugs and various objects of Jewish-Moroccan cultural heritage.
“It’s not a fancy museum, but it contains some real treasures of cultures,” said Joel Rubinfeld, co-chair of the European Jewish Parliament, who saw the museum last month during a visit for talks with Moroccan officials.
Founded fifteen years earlier by the Jewish community of Casablanca, the museum was later managed by the Foundation of Moroccan Judaism under its chief administrator, Simon Levy. The building was renovated following his death in 2011.
Morocco has about 3,000 Jews, a tenth of its original Jewish population before the establishment of the state of Israel.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO