I traveled all the way to Morocco to rediscover my Indiana Jewish roots

Although my husband Richard and I have lived in our San Mateo home for 46 years, we are originally from Indiana. And while Morocco might not seem like the place a Hoosier would get in touch with her roots, an exceptional 12-day Jewish heritage tour of Morocco in May proved otherwise. 

Both Richard and I hail from small-town Indiana: He is from Lafayette, and I am from Terre Haute. We met in high school at a Reform youth conclave.

A joke shared by our travel companion Perry during long bus rides in Morocco perfectly encapsulates the sort of Judaism we grew up with.

The joke is about a man who proudly asked an Orthodox rabbi to say a brachah (blessing) over his new Maserati. 

The rabbi replied, “What’s a Maserati?” 

He then asked a Conservative rabbi, who responded the same way. 

Finally, he turned to a Reform rabbi, who asked, “What’s a brachah?” 

Everyone laughed, including me because the joke perfectly captured my experience growing up Jewish in Terre Haute. 

The Terre Haute synagogue, Temple Israel, cycled through a new rabbi every few years, usually a recent graduate of Cincinnati’s Hebrew Union College, who stayed only long enough to gain experience and apply for work at a larger congregation somewhere. 

The synagogue’s religious school, with its volunteer parent-teachers, reflected the same lack of continuity. One year, when I was a child, the teacher unknowingly handed out the same textbook from the previous year. When the teacher asked if we had studied it before, a classmate confidently replied “no.” The rest of us suppressed our smiles and smirks. To fill in the gaps in my sketchy Jewish education, I would make up stories in my head during services, inspired by the images in the sanctuary’s stained-glass windows, such as one of Moses receiving the Ten Commandments or another of the Akedah (binding of Isaac). 

Sadly, the 115-year-old building where I celebrated every Jewish milestone — from kindergarten consecration to my marriage to Richard in 1968 — was sold in May to a non-Jewish owner and will become a wedding and event venue. Community efforts to save it failed as Terre Haute’s Jewish community dwindled to about 40 members, no longer able to sustain the cost of maintaining the building that had once provided sacred space for hundreds. 

It’s easy to see what happened. The eight students in my Sunday School class, who had been together from kindergarten through high school, all left for college and built lives elsewhere. After my Terre Haute wedding to Richard, who was then a Stanford Law School student, we moved to the Bay Area and never returned, except to visit our parents. 

Flash forward to Casablanca. Our Muslim guide, Ali, possessed a remarkable knowledge of Morocco’s Jewish history. He explained the long history of Morocco’s welcoming, protecting and providing refuge for Jews. Jews had lived in Morocco before the Arabs, back to the period following the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE. Until the 1950s, Morocco was home to at least 250,000 Jews, making it the largest Jewish community in the Islamic world. 

In Casablanca, I learned that this city is the center of Jewish life in Morocco today with at least 1,000 Jews. It reminded me of Indiana and how dramatically demographics can change in a single generation. After Casablanca, we traveled to Fes, where Maimonides lived after fleeing religious persecution in Spain in the 1100s. Three centuries after Maimonides’ era, Morocco would once again welcome Jews, this time those expelled during the Spanish Inquisition. 

As I learned more about Morocco’s long history of providing refuge for Jewish communities, I realized that its story echoed my own family’s history. My father escaped Nazi Germany in 1937 and eventually made his way to Terre Haute, Indiana. Growing up in Terre Haute, I never experienced antisemitism. My non-Jewish classmates accepted me, played with me and allowed me to be myself. In very different ways and under very different circumstances, both Morocco and Terre Haute became places where Jews could find refuge and opportunity. 

In Rabat, Morocco’s capital, a lecture at the Center for Cross-Cultural Learning, founded by Moroccan Muslim academics to foster intercultural understanding, reinforced the spirit of coexistence that had become a recurring theme of our journey. 

As we traveled along the Atlantic coast toward our last destination, Marrakech, we walked through mellah after mellah — the Jewish quarters — now bereft of Jews. We visited more than two dozen synagogues, some deteriorating and others being restored. I photographed Richard standing on the bimah with a book, as if leading a dying congregation in prayer. 

At one synagogue, we met a 92-year-old man who came daily, even though the synagogue was no longer used for worship. He told us that his family had lived in Morocco since the destruction of the Second Temple. Now he came simply to make repairs and ensure the synagogue remained in order. He explained that during the 1950s and 1960s, the children of Moroccan Jews left to attend universities in Europe and the United States. Most never returned. 

In his view, that demographic shift, as much as the creation of the State of Israel, accounted for the dramatic decline of Morocco’s Jewish community. It sounded just like my departure from Terre Haute in 1963.

I had traveled thousands of miles expecting to learn about Morocco’s Jews. I came away with a deeper understanding of my own community’s history. 

Morocco and Indiana, separated by a vast ocean, shared more than I imagined. Who would have thought that Morocco would become the place where this Hoosier rediscovered her Indiana roots?

Related