A
storied community in a room. Hand-written notes, wedding documents, and
Mezuzahs piled everywhere. When Oren Kosansky discovered these items
and more in bags and boxes in a small room in the old synagogue of
Rabat, Morocco as a Fulbright Scholar in 2005, they would change his
life and the lives of his future students forever.The room contained the community’s genizah, or place where Jewish documents containing the sacred Name of God such as books, letters, documents, and ritual items are kept until they can be properly buried in accordance with Jewish law.
Rabat had a strong Jewish community numbering in the thousands into the 20th century, when most Jews emigrated, primarily to Israel and France. Today, Morocco’s capital contains fewer than 100 Jews. In their genizah, the community left behind an invaluable record of hundreds of documents and artifacts in Hebrew, Arabic, French, Judeo-Arabic, Aramaic, Spanish, Judeo-Spanish, Russian, and even English, dating back as far as the 18th century, that powerfully tell the story of the life of a lost community in its own words.
In 2010, Kosansky, now a professor at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Ore., won a $50,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to establish The Rabat Genizah Project in collaboration with the Morocco Jewish Museum in Casablanca– the only Jewish museum in the Arab world.
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