Tracing Your Jewish Roots in Morocco

Most roots trips begin at a kitchen table. Before anything is booked, sit with the oldest relatives you can and ask where each grandparent was born, where they married, which synagogue the family used, and where parents and grandparents are buried. Write down every place name exactly as they say it, and ask how it was spelled in French.

Then decide what the trip is for. Some families want to stand in front of the house; some want to say Kaddish at a grave; some want to attend the hilloula of a saint their grandmother prayed to; many want all three. Knowing the priority shapes the route and the time you need in each place.

Remember that many families moved within Morocco before they left it. Jews from the Atlas villages and the south often moved first to Marrakech or Casablanca: the families of the Tifnout valley, for example, went to those cities before emigrating from 1955. The Ettedgui family, who built a synagogue in Casablanca’s medina, came from the Todgha region in the late 19th century, and a community tradition holds that Casablanca’s first modern Jewish settlers came from the market town of Ben Ahmed. The city on your parents’ documents may be the last stop of a longer journey, and the family’s older roots may lie in a village a day’s drive away.

In most towns the mellah still exists as a neighbourhood, now lived in by Moroccan families. In Fes, Marrakech, Essaouira, Rabat, Salé, Meknes, Sefrou, Tetouan, Demnate and Debdou you can walk the same streets your family walked. Tangier is the exception that catches people out: it never had a walled mellah, and its Jews lived around the Rue des Synagogues in the lower medina and later in the modern town.

Finding a specific house takes patience. Street names have changed over the decades; in Marrakech the old Jewish street names of the mellah were restored only in 2017. Bring any old address, a photograph of the door or the street, and the name of a nearby synagogue, bakery or school, because a guide can often work from landmarks better than from a number. It does happen: in 2026 one traveller wrote that he had returned to the Rabat mellah after 59 years and found his family home. The house will now be someone else’s home, so ask before photographing it and do not expect to go inside.

Some background reading helps before you go. Diarna, an online archive of Jewish sites across North Africa and the Middle East, has descriptions and photographs of many Moroccan mellahs, synagogues and cemeteries. Visiting Jewish Morocco covers sites by region. For the south, the University of Haifa site of Professor Joseph Chetrit has essays on individual communities, with dates of settlement and emigration. In Meknes, the Toledano synagogue-museum displays early 20th-century documents, including lists of Meknes Jewish families. Kamal Hachkar’s documentary Tinghir-Jerusalem: Echoes from the Mellah follows descendants of one Atlas community and is a good way to prepare the younger generation.

Most families want, above all, to visit a grave. The good news is that most Moroccan Jewish cemeteries are in far better condition than a generation ago. Under the Houses of Life programme, launched in 2010 by King Mohammed VI with the Council of Jewish Communities of Morocco, 167 of about 200 inventoried cemeteries were selected for restoration, and almost all were finished by 2015. Most are locked and kept by a guardian.

It helps to know which cemetery to look in, because many towns have more than one. In Casablanca, the old cemetery beside the medina took burials until 1947; most Casablanca Jews who died after that are buried at Ben M’Sik, the key site for grandparents’ graves. In Tangier, the old cemetery on Rue du Portugal holds about a thousand graves with inscriptions in Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese and French, which have been digitised so families can search by name; most 20th-century burials are in the newer cemetery opened in 1935 on the road to Rabat. Essaouira’s seaside cemetery has tombstones from 1775 and was the main cemetery until about 1875; later burials are in a newer cemetery.

Older cemeteries carry their own complications. The Fes cemetery in its present form dates from the 19th century, after the old one was moved, so some older remains were reburied. In Meknes, where the cemetery dates from 1682, many graves were built over older ones. In Agadir, about two-thirds of the tombs belong to victims of the 1960 earthquake.

Caretakers are the people who make a cemetery visit work. Many caretaker families have kept the same cemetery for generations, and many of them are Muslim. At the Jewish cemetery of Sefrou, the caretaker Hmed, in post for 35 years by 2023, reads Hebrew, guides visitors, and receives more than a thousand a year, most of them descendants. In Marrakech the Miâara cemetery is maintained by the community and a caretaker family now in its third generation, and in Ouarzazate a caretaker has been reported to keep a burial register.

What they can usually do: open the gate, take you to the right section, point out the tombs of well-known families and rabbis, and sometimes read the inscriptions with you.

What they cannot do: guarantee that a grave exists, is inscribed or can be found. Many old graves are worn, broken or uninscribed. At Debdou the oldest cemetery has simple stones with no inscriptions at all, and at Ifrane of the Anti-Atlas most tombs have decayed into piles of stones. Even in restored cemeteries, identification can rest on memory: in Tetouan, three 17th- and 18th-century rabbinic graves were only re-identified in 2023, using oral tradition and earlier visitors’ records.

Local community committees, in Casablanca, Fes, Meknes, Tangier and Marrakech, can sometimes help locate a grave or a family name when asked well ahead, and the Tangier community launched a research and archives centre on northern Moroccan Judaism in 2022. Whether any committee holds records for your family, and whether it can share them, is something no one can promise in advance. Treat any record found as a bonus and the visit itself as the goal.

Names, in every form. Moroccan Jewish gravestones are usually inscribed in Hebrew, often naming the person as the son or daughter of their father, and some also carry French or Spanish. Bring each ancestor’s Hebrew name and father’s name, the French spelling of the surname, and known variants: the Tetouan sage Rabbi Isaac Ben Walid, for example, also appears as Bengualid.

Dates. Approximate years of birth, marriage and death, and if you have them, the Hebrew date of death (the yahrzeit), which family members may remember better than the Gregorian one.

Documents and photographs. A ketubah (marriage contract), letters with addresses, school certificates, protectorate-era papers, and photographs of the house, the street, a shop or the family synagogue. Scans on your phone are enough; keep originals at home.

A simple family tree showing who lived where, and the names of any relatives who visited before you.

For the visit itself: a siddur or the prayers you want to say, small stones or candles if your family leaves them, modest clothing, comfortable shoes, water, and small cash for the caretaker’s tip.

It is better to know before you go. In some places the Jewish town has almost disappeared. In Chefchaouen no synagogue survives as a building you can visit, although the old mellah lanes do. In Larache the Berdugo synagogue is now a private house. In Ksar el-Kebir the Rebbi Mose synagogue is reported in ruins. In Agadir, the old city was destroyed by the 1960 earthquake, and the Jewish cemetery is the main trace of the community. In the Atlas and the south, many former Jewish villages have no surviving buildings: no sites are known in the Tifnout valley villages, and the mellahs of Akka and Tioute are ruins.

Even so, these visits are often among the most moving of a trip. Standing in the square of a grandparent’s town, finding the lane where the mellah was, or meeting an older resident who remembers Jewish neighbours can mean as much as a restored synagogue. The southern guide describes what survives in the Souss, the Draa and the Tafilalet, and the Tangier and Tetouan guide covers the smaller towns of the north.

Roots trips are emotional, and they are often shared by grandparents, parents and children with very different energy levels. Plan one family town a day, with travel on separate days where the distances are long, and leave afternoons free after the biggest visits.

Think about the ground. Several cemeteries are on slopes with uneven paths: the old section in Tetouan is steep and overgrown, the newer Debdou cemetery is a short climb above the town, and Sefrou’s cemetery has no electricity, so visits end with the daylight. Rural shrines can be at the end of dirt tracks. A private vehicle lets older travellers rest between stops and lets you change plans when a visit runs long.

Give the younger generation context. A morning at the Museum of Moroccan Judaism in Casablanca or the new museum in Fes helps children and teenagers understand what they will see in the mellah. Ask grandparents to tell their stories on site, and record them; for many families that recording becomes the trip’s most valued souvenir.

Choose the season with care. March to May and September to November are the most comfortable months; July and August are hot, especially inland and in the south. Keep Shabbat as a rest day in a city with a synagogue, and if your family’s saint has a hilloula, decide early whether to join it or avoid the crowds. The hilloula pilgrimages guide has the main dates.

Planning starts with what your family knows: the towns, names, dates, documents and photographs you have. From there the work is to research the sites, the state of the relevant cemeteries and the right local contacts. Where possible, caretakers and community committees are contacted weeks in advance with names to look for, and the route is built so that each family town gets the time it deserves.

On the ground you travel privately with a driver and a guide who knows Jewish heritage, with kosher meals and Shabbat arranged as you need them. The honest promise is this: every effort to find what can be found, and a clear explanation when something cannot. To start, tell us about your family through Plan my trip, or read the Jewish heritage in Morocco guide for the wider picture.