Two very different experiences this morning, and the only word I could think of to link them is “clinging.”
First thing this morning, we checked out of the hotel, as for the next week we’re staying with local families to add a bit of local flavor to our in country experience.
Meet Maria. Maria is Jewish, and one of the local representatives of the Association Israelite du Maroc, whose offices are located adjacent to the synagogue in downtown Rabat. You can’t find it anywhere on the map because it’s not listed. There are also no signs announcing its existence on the street. It maintains an unassuming position in an office block that could best be described as neo-Soviet in its architecture. The locals are extremely protective of it. After the bombing of a synagogue in Djerba several years ago, and also in Marrakesh, you don’t get to know where the synagogue is if you don’t have business there. Whether this is characteristic of what we are told repeatedly is the national attitude of protection toward its Jewish population or because the locals don’t want to deal with the resultant mess and crackdown should terrorists execute a plot in their midst is hard to determine … and probably irrelevant.
Maria looks to be in her sixties, and she bosses around the caretaker, Saieed, with an air that is pretty common to women in the Mediterranean, even on its southern shores. Saieed is Muslim, and wears a skullcap so that he doesn’t have to keep donning and doffing a kippeh every time he enters the room on the first floor where the synagogue is located.
The synagogue is small and, although the visit is scheduled to last over an hour, it’s clear that we’ve seen everything there is to see within moments of entering the single room synagogue. It used to be the school, you see, but they don’t need it any more. There are no children in the Jewish community here. All of the families left – mostly to Canada and France. Israel, interestingly, comes up only as an afterthought. Yes, of course there are some in Israel … but mostly Canada and France. Apparently in Rabat they hung on long enough to get reports back from Israel that the new Zionist entity wasn’t quite as welcoming to Morocco’s Jews as was promised and they decided to seek out better opportunities elsewhere.
Oh, the tourists come, Maria says. They do, and just last week we had a wedding. We are shown the Mikvah, the purification bath where Jewish women are cleansed before their wedding. The grooms get married upstairs, and we are shown where the wedding feast is felt … and, indeed, it’s a room capable of holding a feast and not much else.
There are questions we want to ask, of course, but we know we’ll only get the party line. The Jewish community is, quite literally, dying out here. Without young people the future of what used to be the largest community of Jews anywhere in the Arab world is pretty much written on the wall. And what will become of Maria and her ilk? Who will sit shiva for them when they pass?
The visit reaches an obvious end, even though, as mentioned, our time is supposed to be much longer. We’ve seen what there is to say, and Maria has nothing left to say. It’s a room where perhaps a hundred still gather on Shabbat and high holidays. What more is there to say?
We head down to the street and board the bus, and look up to see Maria and Saieed waving at us as we leave. Soon the block housing the Israelite Association of Morocco is lost among so many other identical ones, and it’s likely that none of us could find the place again if we were asked to do so.
Our next destination is the Cathedral Saint-Pierre in Rabat, the main Catholic church in the Moroccan capital. We arrive early, having been warned that the 11 o’clock mass is usually full (well, that and there wasn’t much else to do at the synagogue).
We enter the sanctuary to the sounds of an African choir practicing for the mass. Several of us take seats in the last pew – most of us aren’t Catholic, only two or three speak French, the language the mass will be conducted in, and there is an unspoken agreement among several of us that if the mass goes on for too long we’ll leave.
We don’t. At a signal I miss entirely, the congregation rises and the service begins. The pews are full – nearly all of the faces are from black Africa. Many of the women are in colorful garments that are clearly from francophone West Africa. There are more people who appear to be Vietnamese or Laotian than I would have expected to see at this, the far corner of the former French Empire. And there are a couple of very old ladies who appear to be remnants of the French protectorate: they were born here, and they’re going to die here, even though this is no longer their country.
The service is entirely in French, save for an Agnes Dieu prayer in Latin and a hymn sung in what we later identify as Langali, a diminutive language from the Democratic Republic of Congo. A couple of the French speakers consult their neighbors in the pew, and we discover that each week, a hymn from a different sub-Saharan language is introduced. Last week, it was one of the Togolese languages. Who can say what it will be next week?
Outside, after the service, a few enterprising Muslim charity cases hawk the crowd for coin. This is also one of the few places that you can see the sub-Saharan congregate amongst themselves. The ladies who are the wives of ambassadors zip off in cars with their chauffeurs, clearly marked by the orange Corps Diplomatique plates. The others chat for a long while, and many are still there after we head off to lunch at a nearby Italian restaurant. They’ll spend the rest of the week trying to blend in to Morocco and trying to pretend that the locals don’t resent their presence here.
You see, most of these people don’t particularly want to be here in Morocco. They’ve set their sights a little farther north, and Morocco is just a way point. They’re aiming for Europe. Many of them may eventually wind up in the notorious Spanish refugee camp in the Ceuta enclave, and its entirely likely that some of them will attempt to cross into Europe … and some will die in the attempt to cross the strait of Gibraltar. Stories are harsh about the traffickers who ply the Strait, almost as bad as those who traffic along the U.S./Mexican border.
And so, I’m left with the thought of clinging hanging in my mind. Two disparate groups of people, barely clinging to existence here in this corner of Africa, waiting for fate to intervene. It’s no wonder they seek solace in religion as often as they can.
