On December 12, 2024, I left with four colleagues from the High Atlas Foundation (HAF) to meet members of the rural community of Tafza (Al Haouz province, Marrakech region)located in the mountain range that bore the horrific epicenter of the September 2023 earthquake.
Unlike the countless visits that members of our Moroccan and American nonprofit organization have made to several hundred village communities in this region since this natural disaster, this recent December visit had a different, albeit humanly essential, restorative goal.
The president of the Moroccan Jewish community of Marrakech, Jacky Kadoch, after receiving authorization from the provincial authorities, asked us to perform a sacred duty at the Jewish cemetery of Tafza. That day, the task was to collect and rebury the human remains that had come out of the ground after years of terrible erosion, probably worsened by the earthquake of the previous year.
The reburial of loved ones by the Haut Atlas Foundation, upon request, is a service of honor that we provide urgently. The HAF carries out community development projects based on the collective will of the local population for initiatives that meet their individual and common priorities.
Our core expertise is in facilitating these introspective conversations that lead to the action plan of the people, “the beneficiaries”, for the development they most desire.. For us, and global experience underlines this, projects endure and achieve people’s life goals through the community’s commitment to seeing them through. It is therefore essential that the new cemetery is built in collaboration with the residents, as close as possible to the historic cemetery on the mountain, because this is also important to them.
The Sunni Muslim Kingdom of Morocco’s attention to Jewish cemeteries in all regions of the country is as natural as the identity of the people. It requires neither explanation nor persuasion, but only confirmation of a day and hour when men of all ages come together to restore what the collective community considers to be part of its own indelible and revered past.
When we arrived that morning, about 30 people had already gathered with their tools to scour the 1,200 square meters of the cemetery, collecting whatever bones they could find, placing them in a bag or cloth cover ( according to Moroccan Jewish and Muslim traditions) and reburying them in a new tomb that the people of Tafza had dug, lined with bricks and built to last for millennia.
Walking with the residents of Tafza through all parts of the cemetery, eyes glued to the ground, we also discussed the work needed to repair and stop the erosion of this crumbling mountainside. We identified critical points for adding and leveling the soil and planting non-fruiting fruit trees as Jewish custom allows. We discussed the three communities of Jewish villagers who left the area generations ago and to whom this approximately 1,000-year-old cemetery belonged.
We traveled to the unnamed grave site of a revered rabbi, whose name the adult generation of Tafza residents no longer remember. Most of the residents who knew this cemetery, the great-grandparents of today’s farming families, are no longer alive.
We took care of the reburial of the bones, which could not be postponed, but there is still a lot of restoration work to be done. Despite the very laudable national initiative of the Moroccan Jewish community led by Serge Berdugo, with the financial support of the Moroccan government following royal instructions, which restored 167 Jewish cemeteries, a large number of them still require attention.
The presence of Moroccan government representatives that morning was warm, helpful and friendly. We had the feeling that together, we had created that day a sub-community of Moroccan protectors of the past and the future. Moroccan Jews have the custom, on the occasion of the anniversary of the death of their righteous person (called hiloula), to eat together and share a moment of generosity.
That December day was not the anniversary of anyone’s death, although it could have been. But we broke bread, dipped it in local raw honey and olive oil, drank tea made from local herbs, and shared a moment that surpassed countless previous moments where Moroccan Muslims and Jews, from government, civil society and small business, from the city and the countryside, have completed something that was called to be done.
We put before our eyes the miracles and blessings of Morocco that make their way into our daily affairs. This explains to me, as well as possible, that serving in Morocco means never giving up.
Dr. Yossef Ben-Meir is a sociologist, former Peace Corps volunteer who served in the High Atlas 30 years ago, and president of the High Atlas Foundation in Morocco.
