Museum of Moroccan Judaism

The museum opened in 1997 in a building that had been a Jewish orphanage, and it was the first museum dedicated to Jewish history and culture in the Arab world. Morocco had the largest Jewish community in the Muslim world - something in the order of a quarter of a million people in the mid-twentieth century, present continuously for around two thousand years and reinforced by the expulsions from Iberia - and almost all of them left between the 1940s and 1970s, leaving a few thousand. The collection covers that: synagogue interiors reassembled room by room, Torah scrolls and silver, embroidered costume from different cities, jewellery, domestic objects, photographs, and material on the regional differences between communities. It is modest in scale and unhurried, run with care, and it exists because the state and the community both wanted it to.

History

The museum was founded in 1997 as the first museum devoted to Judaism in the Arab world, on the initiative of Serge Berdugo, Jacques and Boris Toledano and the professor Simon Levy, in a building put up in 1948 as an orphanage for up to 160 Jewish children; after restoration it was rededicated on 20 December 2016 (Wikipedia, Museum of Moroccan Judaism).

Highlights

• The first such museum in the Arab world - opened in 1997 in a former orphanage.
• Reassembled synagogue rooms - interiors rebuilt inside the museum.
• Regional costume and silver - the differences between city and mountain communities.
• A community that left - a quarter of a million people reduced to a few thousand.

When to go

October to April. An hour or two. Closed Saturdays and Jewish holidays.

What to expect

It is in a suburb and needs a taxi. Closed on Saturdays and holidays. It is small and the display is modest. Entry is charged and photography is restricted.

Nearby

Central Casablanca is north-east; the Habous quarter is north.

Key facts