Years ago, I visited Marrakesh, a city in Morocco on the edge of the great Sahara Desert. I found it picturesque and exotic, a pleasant tourist destination of narrow cobblestone streets, gated residential homes, sandstone fortresses, and a central square brimming with snake charmers, hawkers and hustlers.
While passing through its old quarter of crumbling buildings and colorful outdoor markets, I walked into the mellah, the traditional abode of Jews. By then, the majority of its 35,000 residents had left, having immigrated mainly to Israel, France and Canada.
Five decades on, barely 200 Jews live in Marrakesh, whose population today is around one million.
Its dwindling Jewish community is the subject of Remembering Marrakesh, a melange of five short documentaries now available on the Izzy streaming platform.
The films were made by students from Sapir College in Israel and Mohammed VI Polytechnic University in Morocco.
The movies are impressionistic and skim only the surface, making no attempt to draw a comprehensive sociological picture of a community that has seen better days.
The first one, If Walls Could Speak, focuses on Corcos House in the mellah. The grand residence of affluent Jews for three generations, it is now in a state of disrepair and in dire need of renovation.
Shocked by its shoddy appearance, a family descendant suggests that it should be converted into a cultural center or museum.
Hamid, the Muslim caretaker, points out that Corcos House is as neglected as the collapsing buildings inside the mellah. In a brief scene, he and a Jewish woman, a former resident of Marrakesh, share memories as they glance at old photographs.
In Draw Me A Jew, a handful of Muslim students are asked to draw pencil portraits of Jews. They attend a school that served the Jewish community from 1922 to 1964. The pictures they produce are simple and bereft of animus toward Jews. One of the students leaves a blank on the page, admitting he knows nothing about Jews. This is surely a commentary on a generation of Moroccan Muslims who have never met a Jew in a nation that was once home to a substantial Jewish community.
The principal of the school, as well as one of its former Jewish teachers, are interviewed, but they add little of substance.
The third film, Guardians of Heritage, follows Zakaria Habbad, a young Moroccan craftsman. He has developed an interest in the Jewish artisans who practised their trade in the mellah before immigrating to Israel in the 1950s and 1960s.
He visits Muslim craftsmen who bought their shops from Jews, who specialized in ornamental pieces crafted from gold, silver and copper. They all agree that their legacy forms an integral component of Moroccan culture.
Thirty five synagogues could be found inside the mellah in the 1940s. Nowadays, its few remaining Jews can hardly assemble a quorum for prayer. In Minyan, several Israeli visitors of Moroccan descent visit one of the last functioning synagogues and talk to Kobi Ifrah, a hardware merchant whose father founded one of them.
In the fifth and final film, People Asleep And The Water As Well, Titi Halawi, an ex-resident of Marrakesh, pays a visit to its Jewish cemetery, which is filled to the brim with 20,000 headstones.
Lahcen, the Muslim caretaker, has tended to the graves for many years now and thinks he will work here until the end of his days.
This film offers little apart from fleeting sentimental memories and sharp visuals of undulating graves.
In accordance with its modus operandi, Remembering Marrakesh gives viewers merely a glimpse of the city’s storied Jewish past. There is much more to uncover, and perhaps a filmmaker in the not too distant future will undertake this task.