Essaouira is known as the ‘Wind City of Africa”. This beach-hugging city is visited by hordes of sun-worshipping tourists each year. Shaped by the strong Atlantic wind that blows through its brine-battered alleyways, it has plenty of traditional culture and character to experience. With its 18th-century fortress still circling the city, the place remains almost frozen in time; a proud vestige of Morocco’s prosperous coexistence model. Making up the majority of the city’s population until the 1920s, the thriving and productive Jewish community was deeply integrated into Moroccan society, and the Mellah played an important role in Essaouira’s economic development. Today, A hybrid of Moorish and North African architecture including residential buildings—many with the Star of David carved into the façade—more than a dozen synagogues, a Talmud Torah school, and other buildings are the only physical evidence of centuries of Jewish presence in Essaouira.
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Rabbi Chaim Pinto's was Moroccan rabbi born in the late eighteenth century who has been deemed a “saint” by the community of Essaouira. During his lifetime, he opened the doors of his house and made it a house of worship to his local community. Despite the fact that Essaouira no longer has a Jewish community, the synagogue is still functioning and is visited by pilgrims and Jewish tour groups who come to the city. The synagogue is located on the second level of a three-story courtyard building within the old city walls. The walls are painted with the red clay of the area. The ark is a vivid sky blue that reminds the visitors of Morocco’s alleys. The bimah cover, adorned with golden thread and etched with Tehilim's verses, clearly represents the Moroccan Judaism.
As a way to highlight the Jewish component of the city, Bayt Dakira, the house of memory, was established as a spiritual and heritage space that seeks to preserve and enhance the Judeo-Moroccan memory in the old medina of Essaouira. The restored space shelters the “Slat Attia” synagogue, the house of memory and history “Bayt Dakira” and the Haim and Célia Zafrani International Research Centre on the history of the relations between Judaism and Islam.
Not very far from Place Taraa, there is a small door with a small label informing the passerby that this used to be the house and synagogue of Rabbi David Bel Hazan. Inside the house of this famous rabbi of Mogador, there is a tiny room with a synagogue that is adorned by wooden benches, oil lamps, embroidered tapestries, and the original gazelle skin Torah scrolls .for visitors who come to see the synagogue.
In the southwest corner of The Mellah and next to Em Habanim primary school, a sea of white tombs stretching down the hill, and it is easy to spot some graves of rabbis, tombs of families buried together, and the Cohen section. some have engraved inscriptions, the more recent in French and older ones in Hebrew. There are small chambers for burning candles in some of these tombs, which explains the black soot appearing in stark contrast to the white of the stones. As this is one of the oldest cemeteries in Morocco, tourists will find the tombs of a few notables, such as the 19th-century martyr Solica, venerated by Jews and Muslims alike, and assorted tombs of rabbis like the black-and-white tomb with a large fireplace for burning candles that belongs to Rabbi Yehuda Ben Attar, one of the community's chief rabbis, and a tsadik that attracts thousands of pilgrims every year.
Large windows and open balconies signify your arrival to the Mellah, the old Jewish quarter in Fes Morocco. These dwellings stand in contrast to the typical homes of Muslim families with their often small and hidden windows. The Mellah of Fez was established in 1438. Historical records suggest that the Mellah of Fez was built to safeguard the city’s growing Jewish population by creating a community quarter in return for loyalty to the sultan.
