September 23, 2024
“Today's Morocco is a prime example of what a great peaceful coexistence and international cooperation can be with an Arab country.”
Eli Gabay, an Israeli-born lawyer and current president of the oldest continuously active synagogue in the United States, comes from a distinguished family of Jewish leaders who have fostered Jewish communities across Morocco, Israel, and the U.S. Now residing in Philadelphia, Eli and his mother, Rachel, share their deeply personal story of migration from Morocco to Israel, reflecting on the resilience of their family and the significance of preserving Jewish traditions.
The Gabay family's commitment to justice and heritage is deeply rooted. Eli, in his legal career, worked with Israel’s Ministry of Justice, where he notably helped prosecute John Ivan Demjanjuk, a Cleveland auto worker accused of being the notorious Nazi death camp guard, "Ivan the Terrible."
Jessica Marglin, Professor of Religion, Law, and History at the University of Southern California, offers expert insights into the Jewish exodus from Morocco. She explores the enduring relationship between Morocco's Jewish community and the monarchy, and how this connection sets Morocco apart from its neighboring countries.
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Song credits:
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- “Suspense Middle East” Publisher: Victor Romanov, Composer: Victor Romanov; Item ID: 196056047
Episode Transcript:
ELI GABAY: Standing in court and saying ‘on behalf of the State of Israel’ were the proudest words of my life. It was very meaningful to serve as a prosecutor. It was very meaningful to serve in the IDF.
These were highlights in my life, because they represented my core identity: as a Jew, as a Sephardic Jew, as an Israeli Sephardic Jew. These are the tenets of my life.
MANYA BRACHEAR PASHMAN: The world has overlooked an important episode in modern history: the 800,000 Jews who left or were driven from their homes in the Middle East and North Africa in the mid-20th century.
Welcome to the second season of The Forgotten Exodus, brought to you by American Jewish Committee. This series explores that pivotal moment in history and the little-known Jewish heritage of Iran and Arab nations.
As Jews around the world confront violent antisemitism and Israelis face daily attacks by terrorists on multiple fronts, our second season explores how Jews have lived throughout the region for generations – despite hardship, hostility, and hatred–then sought safety and new possibilities in their ancestral homeland.
I'm your host, Manya Brachear Pashman. Join us as we explore untold family histories and personal stories of courage, perseverance, and resilience from this transformative and tumultuous period of history for the Jewish people and the Middle East.
The world has ignored these voices. We will not. This is The Forgotten Exodus.
Today's episode: leaving Morocco.
MANYA: There are three places Eli Gabay calls home: Philadelphia, the city where he has raised his children; Morocco, the land where his parents Rachel and Amram were born and his ancestors lived for generations; and Israel, his birthplace and original ancestral homeland. Eli has been on a quest to honor all those identities since he left Israel at the age of 12.
ELI: On my father's side, they were all rabbis. On my mother's side, they were all businesspeople who headed synagogues. And so, my grandfather had a synagogue, and my other grandfather had a synagogue. When they transplanted to Israel, they reopened these synagogues in the transition camp in Be'er Sheva. Both families had a synagogue of their own.
MANYA: For the past five years, Eli has served as president of his synagogue--the historic Congregation Mikveh Israel, America’s oldest continuous synagogue, founded in Philadelphia in 1740.
Descended from a long line of rabbis going back generations, Eli is a litigation attorney, the managing partner of a law firm, a former prosecutor, and, though it might seem odd, the Honorary Consul of the Republic of Nicaragua in Philadelphia.
But the professional role that has brought him the most acclaim was his time in the 1980s, working for Israel’s Ministry of Justice, decades after the Holocaust, still trying to hold its perpetrators accountable.
CLIP - ‘THE DEVIL NEXT DOOR’ TRAILER: Charges were filed today against John Demjanjuk, the 66-year-old Ukrainian native, who’s accused of being a Nazi death camp guard named Ivan the Terrible. The crimes he was accused of…
MANYA: We’ll tell you more about that later. But first, we take you to the Jerusalem Israeli Gift Shop in northeast Philadelphia, a little slice of Israel on the corner of Castor Avenue and Chandler Street.
[shofar sounds]
Every day, amid the menorahs and shofars, frames and mezuzahs, Eli’s 84-year-old mother Rachel Gabay, the family matriarch and owner of thisJudaica shop, is transported back to the place where she grew up: Israel.
ELI: My father was a teacher all his life, and my mother [shofar sounds] runs a Jewish Judaica store that sells shofars, you can hear in the background.
RACHEL: It's my baby. The store here became my baby.
CUSTOMER: You’re not going to remember this, but you sold us our ketubah 24 years ago.
RACHEL: Yeah. How are you, dear?
ELI: Nice.
CUSTOMER: We’re shopping for someone else’s wedding now.
RACHEL: Oh, very nice… For who?
CUSTOMER: A friend of ours, Moshe, who is getting married and we wanted to get him a mezuzah.
MANYA: For Rachel, Israel represents the safety, security, and future her parents sought for her when in 1947 they placed her on a boat to sail away from Morocco. By then, Casablanca had become a difficult place to be Jewish. Israel offered a place to belong. And for that, she will always be grateful.
RACHEL: To be a Jew, to be very good…
ELI: Proud.
RACHEL: Proud. I have a country, and I am somebody.
ELI: My father's family comes from the High Atlas Mountains, from a small village called Aslim.The family arrived in that area sometime in 1780 or so.
There were certain events that went on in Morocco that caused Jews from the periphery and from smaller cities to move to Casablanca. Both my parents were born in Morocco in Casablanca. Both families arrived in Casablanca in the early 30s, mid 30s.
MANYA: Today, the port city of Casablanca is home to several synagogues and about 2,000 Jews, the largest community of Morocco. The Museum of Moroccan Judaism in suburban Casablanca, the first museum on Judaism in the Arab world, stands as a symbol of the lasting Jewish legacy in Morocco. Indeed, there’s been a Jewish presence in what is considered modern-day Morocco for some 2,000 years, dating back to the early days of the establishment of Roman control.
Morocco was home to thousands of Jews, many of whom lived in special quarters called “Mellah,” or Jewish ghetto. Mellahs were common in cities across Morocco.
JESSICA: Morocco was one of the few places in the Islamic world where there emerged the tradition of a distinctive Jewish quarter that had its own walls and was closed with its own gates.
MANYA: Jessica Marglin is a professor of religion, law, and history at the University of Southern California. Her research focuses on the history of Jews and Muslims in North Africa and the Mediterranean.
JESSICA: There's a bit of a debate. Were these quarters there to control Jews and force them to all live in one spot and was it a sort of form of basically repression? Or was it a way to protect them? The first mellah, the one in Fez is right next to the palace. And so there was a sense that the Jews would be closer to the Sultan or the Sultan's representative, and thus more easily protectable.
It could be interpreted as a bad thing. And some Jews did see it as an unfair restriction. But I would say that most Jews didn't question the idea that Jews would live together. And that was sort of seen as natural and desirable. And there was a certain kind of autonomous jurisdiction to the mellah, too.
Because Jews had their own courts. They had their own butchers. They had their own ovens. Butchers and ovens would have been kosher. They could sell wine in the mellah. They could do all these things that were particular to them. And that's where all the synagogues were. And that's where the Jewish cemetery was, right? It was really like a little Jewish city, sort of within the city.
MANYA: Unlike other parts of the Middle East and North Africa where pogroms and expulsions, especially after the creation of the state of Israel, caused hundreds of thousands of Jews to abruptly flee all at once – spilling out of countries they had called home for centuries – Jews chose to leave Morocco gradually over time, compared to the exodus from other Arab countries.
JESSICA: When I teach these things, I set up Morocco and Iraq as the two ends of the spectrum. Iraq being the most extreme, where Jews were really basically kicked out all at once. Essentially offered no real choice. I mean, some did stay, but it was choosing a totally reduced life.
Versus Morocco, where the Jews who left did so really, with a real choice. They could have stayed and the numbers are much more gradual than anywhere else. So there was a much larger community that remained for years and years and years, even after ‘67, into the ‘70s.
Even though they kept going down, it was really, it was not like Iraq where the population just falls off a cliff, right? It's like one year, there's 100,000, the next year, they’re 5,000. In Morocco, it really went down extremely gradually. And that's in part why it's still the largest Jewish community in the Arab world by far.
MANYA: Morocco’s Jewish history is by no means all rosy. In all Arab countries, antisemitism came in waves and different forms. But there are several moments in history when the Moroccan monarchy could’ve abandoned the Jewish population but didn’t. And in World War II, the Moroccan monarch took steps to safeguard the community. In recent years, there have been significant gestures such as the opening of the Jewish museum in Casablanca, a massive restoration of landmarks that honor Morocco’s Jewish past, including 167 Jewish cemeteries, and the inclusion of Holocaust education in school curricula.
In 2020, Morocco became one of four Arab countries to sign a normalization agreement with Israel, as part of the U.S.-backed Abraham Accords, which allowed for economic and diplomatic cooperation and direct flights between the two countries.
MANYA: Oral histories suggest that Jews have lived in Morocco for some 2,000 years, roughly since the destruction of the Second Temple. But tangible evidence of a Jewish presence doesn’t date as far back.
JESSICA: The archaeological remains suggest that the community dates more to the Roman period. There was a continual presence from at least since the late Roman period, certainly well before the Islamic conquests.
MANYA: Like other parts of the Middle East and North Africa, Jews in Morocco were heavily concentrated in particular artisanal trades. Many were cobblers, tailors, and jewelers who adorned their creations with intricate designs and embellishments. Gemstones, carved coral, geometric designs, and symbols such as the Hamsa to bless the wearer with good fortune and protect them from the evil eye.
JESSICA: And there were certain areas where they kind of were overrepresented in part because of stigmas associated with certain crafts for Muslims. So gold and silver jewelry making in certain parts of Morocco, like in the city of Fez, Jews were particularly overrepresented in the trade that made these gold threads, which are called skalli in Moroccan Arabic, and which are used to embroider sort of very fancy clothing for men and for women. Skalli for instance, is a very common last name for Jews.
MANYA: Jessica notes that in the 12th and 13th Centuries, Morocco came under the rule of the Almohad caliphate, a fundamentalist regime that saw itself as a revolutionary reform movement. Under the Almohad dynasty, local Christians in North Africa from Morocco to Libya all but disappeared.
Jews on the other hand stayed. She suspects Morocco developed its own version of crypto-Jews who superficially converted to Islam or at least lived outwardly as Muslims to survive.
JESSICA: There's probably more of a sense of Jews had more experience of living as minorities. Also, where else were they going to go? It wasn't so obvious. So whatever conversions there were, some of them must have stuck. And there are still, for instance, Muslim families in Fez named Kohen . . . Cohen.
MANYA: Jews chose Morocco as a place of refuge in 1391, when a series of mob attacks on Jewish communities across Spain killed hundreds and forcibly converted others to Christianity. As opposed to other places in Europe, Morocco was considered a place where Jews could be safe. More refugees arrived after the Alhambra Decree of 1492 expelled Jews from Spain who refused to convert. That is when Eli’s father’s side of the family landed in Fez.
ELI: Our tradition is that the family came from Spain, and we date our roots to Toledo, Spain. The expulsion of the Jews took place out of Spain in 1492 at which time the family moved from Spain to Morocco to Fez.
MANYA: At that time, the first mellahs emerged, the name derived from the Arabic word for salt. Jessica says that might have referred to the brackish swamps where the mellah were built.
JESSICA: The banning of Jews from Spain in 1492 brought a lot of Jews to North Africa, especially Morocco, because Morocco was so close. And, you know, that is why Jews in northern Morocco still speak Spanish today, or a form of Judeo Spanish known as Haketia. So, there were huge numbers of Iberian Jews who ended up throughout Morocco. And then for a long time, they remained a kind of distinctive community with their own laws and their own rabbis and their own traditions. Eventually, they kind of merged with local Jews. And they used Spanish actually, for decades, until they finally sort of Arabized in most of Morocco.
ELI: My father's family, as I said, comes from a small town of Aslim. The family arrived in that area sometime in 1780 or so after there was a decree against Jews in Fez to either convert to Islam or leave. And so in a real sense, they were expelled from that region of Fez.
There were Jews who arrived throughout the years after different exiles from different places. But predominantly the Jews that arrived in 1492 as a result of the Spanish expulsion were known as the strangers, and they integrated themselves in time into the fabric of Moroccan Jewry.
MANYA: For Eli’s family, that meant blending in with the nomadic Amazigh, or indigenous people of North Africa, commonly called Berbers. Many now avoid that term because it was used by European colonialists and resembles the word “barbarians.” But it’s still often used colloquially.
ELI: Aslim is in the heart of Berber territory. My father's family did speak Berber. My grandfather spoke Berber, and they dressed as Berbers. They wore jalabia, which is the dress for men, for instance, and women wore dresses only, a head covering.
Men also wore head coverings. They looked like Berbers in some sense, but their origins were all the way back to Spain.
MANYA: In most cases across Morocco, Jews were classified as dhimmis, non-Muslim residents who were given protected status. Depending on the rulers, dhimmis lived under different restrictions; most paid a special tax, others were forced to wear different clothes. But it wasn’t consistent.
ELI: Rulers, at their whim, would decide if they were good to the Jews or bad to the Jews. And the moment of exchange between rulers was a very critical moment, or if that ruler was attacked.
MANYA: The situation for Jews within Morocco shifted again in 1912 when Morocco became a French protectorate. Many Jews adopted French as their spoken language and took advantage of educational opportunities offered to them by Alliance Israélite Universelle. The borders also remained open for many Jews who worked as itinerant merchants to go back and forth throughout the region.
JESSICA: Probably the most famous merchants were the kind of rich, international merchants who dealt a lot with trade across the Mediterranean and in other parts of the Middle East or North Africa. But there were a lot of really small-time merchants, people whose livelihood basically depended on taking donkeys into the hinterland around the cities where Jews tended to congregate.
MANYA: Rachel’s family, businesspeople, had origins in two towns – near Agadir and in Essaouira. Eli has copies of three edicts issued to his great-grandfather Nissim Lev, stating that as a merchant, he was protected by the government in his travels.
But the open borders didn’t contain the violence that erupted in other parts of the Middle East, including the British Mandate of Palestine.
In late August 1929, a clash about the use of space next to the Western Wall in Jerusalem led to riots and a pogrom of Jews who had lived there for thousands of years. Moroccan Jews also were attacked. Rachel’s grandfather Nissim died in the violence.
RACHEL: He was a peddler. He was a salesman. He used to go all week to work, and before Thursday, he used to come for Shabbat. So they caught him in the road, and they took his money and they killed him there.
ELI: So my great-grandfather–
RACHEL: He was very young.
ELI: She's speaking of, in 1929 there were riots in Israel, in Palestine. In 1929 my great-grandfather went to the market, and at that point … so . . . a riot had started, and as my mother had described, he was attacked.
And he was knifed. And he made it not very far away, all the other Jews in the market fled. Some were killed, and he was not fortunate enough to escape. Of course, all his things were stolen, and it looked like a major robbery of the Jews in the market. It gave the opportunity to do so, but he was buried nearby there in a Jewish cemetery in the Atlas Mountains. So he was not buried closer to his own town. I went to visit that place.
MANYA: In the mid-1930s, both Amram and Rachel’s families moved to the mellah in Casablanca where Amram’s father was a rabbi. Rachel’s family ran a bathhouse. Shortly after Amram was born, his mother died, leaving his father to raise three children.
Though France still considered Morocco one of its protectorates, it left Morocco’s Sultan Mohammad V as the country’s figurehead. When Nazis occupied France during World War II and the Vichy regime instructed the sultan to deport Morocco’s Jews to Nazi death camps, he reportedly refused, saving thousands of lives.
But Amram’s grandmother did not trust that Morocco would protect its Jews. Following the Second Battle of El Alamein in Egypt, the Axis Powers’ second attempt to invade North Africa, she returned to the Atlas Mountains with Amran and his siblings and stayed until they returned to Casablanca at the end of the war.
ELI: There was a fear that the Nazis were going to enter Morocco. My father, his grandmother, took him from Casablanca with two other children and went back to Aslim in the mountains, because she said we can better hide there. We can better hide in the Atlas Mountains. And so my father returned, basically went from Casablanca to the Atlas Mountains to hide from the coming Nazis.
MANYA: In 1947, at the age of 10, Amram went from Casablanca to an Orthodox yeshiva in England. Another destination for Jews also had emerged. Until then, no one had wanted to move to British-controlled Palestine where the political landscape and economic conditions were more unstable.
The British restricted Jewish immigration making the process difficult, even dangerous. Additionally, French Moroccan authorities worked to curb the Zionist movement that was spreading throughout Europe. But Rachel’s father saw the writing on the wall and took on a new vocation.
RACHEL: His name is Moshe Lev and he was working with people to send to Eretz Yisrael.
MANYA: A Zionist activist, Rachel's father worked for a clandestine movement to move children and eventually their families to what soon would become Israel. He wanted his children, including his 7-year-old daughter Rachel, to be the first.
RACHEL: He worked there, and he sent everybody. Now our family were big, and they sent me, and then my sister went with my father and two brothers, and then my mom left by herself They flew us to Norvege [Norway].
MANYA: After a year in Norway, Rachel was taken to Villa Gaby in Marseille, France, a villa that became an accommodation center for Jews from France who wanted to join the new State of Israel. There, as she waited for a boat to take her across the Mediterranean to Israel, she spotted her brother from afar. Nissim, named for their late grandfather, was preparing to board his own boat. She pleaded to join him.
RACHEL: So we’re in Villa Gaby couple months. That time, I saw my brother, I get very emotional. They said ‘No, he's older. I told them ‘I will go with him.’ They said ‘No, he's older and you are young, so he will go first. You are going to stay here.’ He was already Bar Mitzvah, like 13 years.
I was waiting there. Then they took to us in the boat. I remember it was like six, seven months. We were sitting there in Villa Gaby. And then from Villa Gaby, we went to Israel. The boat, but the boat was quite ahead of time. And then they spoke with us, ‘You're going to go. Somebody will come and pick you up, and you are covered. If fish or something hurts you, you don't scream, you don't say nothing. You stay covered.
So one by one, a couple men they came. They took kids and out. Our foot was wet from the ocean, and here and there they was waiting for us, people with a hot blanket. I remember that.
MANYA: Rachel landed at Kibbutz Kabri, then a way station for young newcomers in northern Israel. She waited there for years without her family – until one stormy day.
RACHEL: One day. That's emotional. One day we were sitting in the living room, it was raining, pouring. We couldn't go to the rooms, so we were waiting. All of a sudden, a group of three men came in, and I heard my father was talking. His voice came to me. And I said to the teacher, taking care of us. I said ‘You know what? Let me tell you one thing. I think my father is here.’ She said ‘No, you just imagination. Now let's go to the rooms to sleep.’
So we went there. And all of a sudden she came to me. She said, ‘You know what? You're right. He insists to come to see you. He will not wait till morning, he said. I wanted to see my daughter now. He was screaming. They didn't want him to be upset. He said we'll bring her because he said here's her picture. Here's her and everything. So I came and oh my god was a nice emotional. And we were there sitting two or three hours.
My father said, Baruch Hashem. I got the kids. Some people, they couldn't find their kids, and I find my kids, thanks God. And that's it. It was from that time he wants to take us. They said, No, you live in the Ma’abara. Not comfortable for the kids. We cannot let you take the kids. The kids will stay in their place till you establish nicely. But it was close to Pesach. He said, we promise Pesach, we bring her, for Pesach to your house. You give us the address. Where are you? And we'll bring her, and we come pick her up.
JESSICA: Really as everywhere else in the Middle East and North Africa, it was the Declaration of the Independence of Israel. And the war that started in 1947, that sort of set off a wave of migration, especially between ‘48 and ‘50. Those were the kind of highest numbers per year.
MANYA: Moroccan Jews also were growing frustrated with how the French government continued to treat them, even after the end of World War II. When the state of Israel declared independence, Sultan Mohammad V assured Moroccan Jews that they would continue to be protected in Morocco. But it was clear that Moroccan Jew’s outward expression of support for Israel would face new cultural and political scrutiny and violence.
Choosing to emigrate not only demonstrated solidarity, it indicated an effort to join the forces fighting to defend the Jewish state. In June 1948, 43 Jews were killed by local Muslims in Oujda, a departure point for Moroccan Jews seeking to migrate to Israel.
Amram arrived in Israel in the early 1950s. He returned to Morocco to convince his father, stepmother, and brother to make aliyah as well. Together, they went to France, then Israel where his father opened the same synagogue he ran in the mellah of Casablanca.
Meanwhile in Morocco, the Sultan’s push for Moroccan independence landed him in exile for two years. But that didn’t last long. The French left shortly after he returned and Morocco gained its independence in March 1956.
CLIP - CASABLANCA 1956 NEWSREEL: North Africa, pomp and pageantry in Morocco as the Sultan Mohamed Ben Youssef made a state entry into Casablanca, his first visit to the city since his restoration last autumn. Aerial pictures reveal the extent of the acclamation given to the ruler whose return has of his hope brought more stable conditions for his people.
MANYA: The situation of the Jews improved. For the first time in their history, they were granted equality with Muslims. Jews were appointed high-ranking positions in the first independent government. They became advisors and judges in Morocco’s courts of law.
But Jewish emigration to Israel became illegal. The immigration department of the Jewish Agency that had operated inside Morocco since 1949 closed shop and representatives tasked with education about the Zionist movement and facilitating Aliyah were pressed to leave the country.
JESSICA: The independent Moroccan state didn't want Jews emigrating to Israel, partly because of anti-Israeli, pro-Palestinian sentiment, and partly because they didn't want to lose well-educated, productive members of the State, of the new nation.
MANYA: Correctly anticipating that Moroccan independence was imminent and all Zionist activity would be outlawed, Israel’s foreign intelligence agency, the Mossad, created the Misgeret, which organized self-defense training for Jews across the Arab countries. Casablanca became its center in Morocco. Between November 1961 and the spring of 1964, the Mossad carried out Operation Yakhin, a secret mission to get nearly 100,000 Jews out of Morocco into Israel.
JESSICA: There was clandestine migration during this period, and a very famous episode of a boat sinking, which killed a lot of people. And there was increasing pressure on the Moroccan state to open up emigration to Israel. Eventually, there were sort of secret accords between Israelis and the Moroccan King, which did involve a payment of money per Jew who was allowed to leave, from the Israelis to the Moroccans.
MANYA: But cooperation between Israel and Morocco reportedly did not end there. According to revelations by a former Israeli military intelligence chief in 2016, King Hassan II of Morocco provided the intelligence that helped Israel win the Six-Day War. In 1965, he shared recordings of a key meeting between Arab leaders held inside a Casablanca hotel to discuss whether they were prepared for war and unified against Israel. The recordings revealed that the group was not only divided but woefully ill-prepared.
JESSICA: Only kind of after 1967, did the numbers really rise again. And 1967, again, was kind of a flashpoint. The war created a lot of anti-Zionist and often anti-Jewish sentiment across the region, including in Morocco, and there were some riots and there were, there was some violence, and there was, again, a kind of uptick in migration after that.
For some people, they'll say, yes, there was antisemitism, but that wasn't what made me leave. And other people say yes, at a certain point, the antisemitism got really bad and it felt uncomfortable to be Jewish. I didn't feel safe. I didn't feel like I wanted to raise my children here.
For some people, they will say ‘No, I would have happily stayed, but my whole family had left, I didn't want to be alone.’ And you know, there's definitely a sense of some Moroccan Jews who wanted to be part of the Zionist project. It wasn't that they were escaping Morocco. It was that they wanted to build a Jewish state, they wanted to be in the Holy Land.
ELI: Jews in Morocco fared better than Jews in other Arab countries. There is no question about that.
MANYA: Eli Gabay is grateful to the government for restoring many of the sites where his ancestors are buried or called home. The current king, Mohammed VI, grandson of Mohammed V, has played a significant role in promoting Jewish heritage in Morocco. In 2011, a year after the massive cemetery restoration, a new constitution was approved that recognized the rights of religious minorities, including the Jewish community.
It is the only constitution besides Israel’s to recognize the country’s Hebraic roots. In 2016, the King attended the rededication ceremony of the Ettedgui Synagogue in Casablanca.
The rededication of the synagogue followed the re-opening of the El Mellah Museum, which chronicles the history of Moroccan Jewry. Other Jewish museums and Jewish cultural centers have opened across the country, including in Essaouira, Fes, and Tangier. Not to mention–the king relies on the same senior advisor as his father did, Andre Azoulay, who is Jewish.
ELI: It is an incredible example. We love and revere the king of Morocco. We loved and revered the king before him, his father, who was a tremendous lover of the Jews. And I can tell you that in Aslim, the cemetery was encircled with a wall and well maintained at the cost, at the pay of the King of Morocco in a small, little town, and he did so across Morocco, preserved all the Jewish sites. Synagogues, cemeteries, etc.
Today's Morocco is a prime example of what a great peaceful coexistence and international cooperation can be with an Arab country.
MANYA: Eli is certainly not naïve about the hatred that Jews face around the world. In 1985, the remains of Josef Mengele, known as the Nazis’ Angel of Death, were exhumed from a grave outside Sao Paulo, Brazil. Eli was part of a team of experts from four countries who worked to confirm it was indeed the Nazi German doctor who conducted horrific experiments on Jews at Auschwitz.
Later that decade, Eli served on the team with Israel’s Ministry of Justice that prosecuted John Ivan Demjanjuk, a retired Cleveland auto worker accused of being the notorious Nazi death camp guard known as “Ivan the Terrible.” Demjanjuk was accused of being a Nazi collaborator who murdered Jews in the gas chambers at the Treblinka death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland during World War II. In fact, Eli is featured prominently in a Netflix documentary series about the case called The Devil Next Door.
CLIP - ‘THE DEVIL NEXT DOOR’ TRAILER: …Nazi death camp guard named Ivan the Terrible. The crimes that he was accused of were horrid.
The Israeli government is seeking his extradition as a war criminal.
And that’s where the drama begins.
MANYA: Demjanjuk was convicted and sentenced to death, but the verdict was later overturned. U.S. prosecutors later extradited him to Germany on charges of being an accessory to the murder of about 28,000 Jews at Sobibor. He was again convicted but died before the outcome of his appeal.
ELI: Going back to Israel and standing in court and saying ‘on behalf of the State of Israel’ were the proudest words of my life. It was very meaningful to serve as a prosecutor. It was very meaningful to serve in the IDF. These were highlights in my life.
They represented my core identity: as a Jew, as a Sephardic Jew, as an Israeli Sephardic Jew. These are the tenets of my life. I am proud to serve today as the president of the longest running synagogue in America.
MANYA: Eli has encountered hatred in America too. In May 2000 congregants arriving for Shabbat morning prayers at Philadelphia’s Beit Harambam Congregation where Eli was first president were greeted by police and firefighters in front of a burned-out shell of a building. Torah scrolls and prayer books were ruined.
When Rachel opened her store 36 years ago, it became the target of vandals who shattered her windows. But she doesn’t like to talk about that. She has always preferred to focus on the positive. Her daughter Sima Shepard, Eli’s sister, says her mother’s optimism and resilience are also family traditions.
SIMA SHEPARD: Yeah, my mom speaks about the fact that she left Morocco, she is in Israel, she comes to the U.S. And yet consistently, you see one thing: the gift of following tradition. And it's not just again religiously, it's in the way the house is Moroccan, the house is Israeli. Everything that we do touches on previous generations.
I'm a little taken that there are people who don't know that there are Jews in Arab lands. They might not know what they did, because European Jews came to America first. They came to Israel first. However, however – we've lived among the Arab countries, proudly so, for so many years.
MANYA: Moroccan Jews are just one of the many Jewish communities who, in the last century, left Arab countries to forge new lives for themselves and future generations.
Join us next week as we share another untold story of The Forgotten Exodus.
Many thanks to Eli, Rachel and Sima for sharing their family’s story.
Too many times during my reporting, I encountered children and grandchildren who didn’t have the answers to my questions because they’d never asked. That’s why one of the goals of this project is to encourage you to ask those questions. Find your stories.
Atara Lakritz is our producer. T.K. Broderick is our sound engineer.
Special thanks to Jon Schweitzer, Nicole Mazur, Sean Savage, and Madeleine Stern, and so many of our colleagues, too many to name really, for making this series possible.
You can subscribe to The Forgotten Exodus on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts, and you can learn more at AJC.org/theforgottenexodus.
The views and opinions of our guests don’t necessarily reflect the positions of AJC.
You can reach us at theforgottenexodus@ajc.org. If you've enjoyed this episode, please be sure to spread the word, and hop onto Apple Podcasts or Spotify to rate us and write a review to help more listeners find us.
