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Friday January 25, 2008

Muslims restoring Tunisian synagogue

by larry luxner
jta

le kef, tunisia | A man on a donkey shuffles by, collecting trash in the midday heat. Merchants hawk their wares in French and Arabic from stalls lining the cobblestone streets.

In this sun-drenched city of 120,000, where Jews are about as common as snowflakes, the local synagogue has become a tourist attraction.

“The last Jew left in 1984,” said Salem Zenan, caretaker of the synagogue known simply as the Ghribet el Yahud — sanctuary of the Jews. “But when I was little, we lived with Jewish people. I’m happy that visitors still come here.”

Zenan, 54, says about a dozen tourists stop by the synagogue every day. A glance at the official guest book reveals entries from the United States, Europe, Lebanon and even Libya.

The Le Kef synagogue, among the most isolated in North Africa, is one of several across Tunisia that is enjoying a renaissance of sorts, with official support from President Zine el Abidine Ben Ali.

Despite the absence of diplomatic ties between Tunis and Jerusalem, Tunisia’s 1,500 Jews live relatively peaceful, prosperous lives. And their houses of worship — from Le Kef in the northwest, near the Algerian border, to the Mediterranean island of Djerba, where the synagogue was attacked in 1985 and 2002 — gradually are being restored, even when there are no Jews left to pray in them.

The government clearly wants to encourage Jewish tourism from Europe, Israel and the United States. But Tunisians say it’s not just about bringing in dollars and euros.

Tunisia’s president “wants people to come back and visit the places where they were born and raised,” said Monique Hayoun, a software engineer living in Paris who left her hometown of Nabeul in 1976 and occasionally returns to Tunisia to visit family and friends.

“The Israelis are nostalgic. For a long time, they wanted to come back here, but in the ’60s and ’70s it wasn’t so easy,” Hayoun said. “Under President Ben Ali, there’s much more openness.”

In the early 1930s, as many as 900 Jews lived in Le Kef, according to Mohamed Tlili, the former director of the Historical Society of Le Kef. But after 1967, most Tunisian Jews immigrated to Israel, and by the early 1980s barely a handful remained in Le Kef.

“We had a moral obligation to do something,” said Tlili, the man responsible for restoring Le Kef’s synagogue. “Everybody wanted to help, but they didn’t know what to do. It was like chaos. There was nobody praying in there. It was dirty and in ruins.”

In the end, the office of the president stepped in, providing 50,000 Tunisian dinars — about $40,000 — for the three-month restoration project supervised by Tlili and his staff.

Located in the heart of Le Kef’s casbah — a neighborhood of whitewashed houses and turquoise-blue windows and doors — the synagogue is a tidy little building open seven days a week, year round. Inside, the walls are decorated with 139 plaques honoring the memory of long-departed families with names like Sabbah, Levy and Sassoon.

Among the more unusual features is its 600-year-old Torah scrolls written on sheepskin. A wooden circumcision chair is displayed prominently at the entrance, and black-and-white photos show the 1994 restoration at various stages.

“The president of the synagogue wanted to take the scrolls to Tunis or Djerba, but the local authorities said no, so they kept the scrolls in the local museum for 10 years until the synagogue was restored,” Tlili said. “Our president himself took care of the financing. He insisted it be done because it was a part of our heritage.”

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