By Yossef Ben-Meir
Marrakech
This article describes a day in December when the Moroccan Jewish community implemented restoration work of its High Atlas cemetery in Tafza, carried out by members of local farming families. This joint local action crystalizes the sublime Moroccan Jewish and Muslim national experience.
On the 12th of December 2024, I set out with four colleagues of the High Atlas Foundation (HAF) to meet with members of the rural community of Tafza (Al Haouz province, Marrakesh region), located in the mountain range that bore the horrendous epicenter of the September 2023 earthquake. Unlike the countless visits that members of our Moroccan and US non-profit organization have made to many hundreds of village communities in this area since that natural disaster, this recent December visit was of a different, yet still humanly essential, restoration purpose
The president of the Moroccan Jewish community in Marrakesh, Jacky Kadoch, followed by the authorization of the provincial governing authorities, had asked that we perform a sacred duty at the Tafza Jewish cemetery. Our purpose that day was to gather and bury again the human bone remains that have emerged from the ground from the years of terrible erosion, likely exacerbated by the previous year’s earthquake.
The High Atlas Foundation’s re-tombing of the beloved departed, upon request, is an honoured service that we perform with urgency. HAF implements community development projects based on the local people’s collective will for initiatives that meet their individual and shared priority needs.
Our best expertise is in facilitating those introspective conversations that result in the peoples’—the beneficiaries’—action plan for the development they want most of all. For us, and as is underscored by global experience, projects endure and meet the people’s goals of their lives because of the communities’ dedication in carrying them out. It is therefore vital that the re-tombing be done together with the people in closest proximity to the historic mountain cemetery since doing so also holds importance for them.
The Sunni Muslim Kingdom of Morocco’s caretaking of Jewish cemeteries in all parts of the nation comes as naturally as the peoples’ identity itself may come. It requires no explanation, no persuasion, only the confirmation of a day and a time when men of all ages gather to restore what the collective community sees as part of their own indelible and revered past. When we arrived that morning, roughly 30 people were already gathered with their tools to traverse the 1,200-square-meter cemetery, pick up every observed bone, place them in a cloth sack or covering (as per Moroccan Jewish and Muslim traditions), and re-bury them in a new grave that Tafza residents had dug, lined with brick, and built to endure for the next millennia.
As we walked together with Tafza people in all parts of the cemetery with our eyes to the ground, we also spoke about the work needed to redress and end the erosion of this degrading mountain slope. We identified the critical points at which to add and level soil and plant non-bearing fruit trees in a manner allowable by Jewish custom. We spoke about the three Jewish village communities who left the area several generations ago to which this circa 1,000-year-old cemetery belonged. We went to the unmarked burial site of a revered rabbi, whose name this adult generation of Tafza people no longer recall. Most local oracles of knowledge about this cemetery, great grandparents of today’s farming families, are no longer alive.
We addressed the exigency of bone reburial, but an enormity of restoration work remains. Even with the highly commendable national initiative of the Moroccan Jewish community led by Serge Berdugo with financial backing of the Moroccan government following Royal instructions that restored 167 Jewish cemeteries, a large number still require attention.
The Moroccan government representatives’ presence that morning was warm, helpful, and kindred. It felt as if all together we had created that day a subcommunity of Moroccan protectors of the past and future. It is a Moroccan Jewish custom at the anniversary of the passing of their righteous ones (the occasion referred to as a hiloula) to eat together and enjoy a shared moment of bounty. On that December day, it was not an anniversary of anyone passing, though it might have been. But we did break bread, dipped it in local raw honey and olive oil, drank tea made with local herbs, and shared a moment atop infinite previous moments of Moroccan Muslim and Jewish people from government, civil society, and small businesses, from city and rural places, completing something that was calling to be done.
We brought before all of our eyes the miracles and blessings of Morocco that find their way into our daily affairs. It explains for me, as well as I have been able, that to serve in Morocco is to never let go.
Dr. Yossef Ben-Meir is a sociologist, a former Peace Corps Volunteer who served in the High Atlas Mountains 30 years ago, and President of the High Atlas Foundation in Morocco.
