On Thursday, November 16, 2017 in Rabat, a high-level French delegation handed over to the National Archives of Morocco copies of funds from Jewish-Moroccan memory, thus enriching its collections and giving new impetus to academic research on Moroccan Judaism.
The director of the Archives of Morocco, Jamaâ Baida, indicated that the handover of these historical funds of an "extreme wealth" is the result of several approaches, notably with the Diplomatic Archives of France and the Shoah Memorial, stating that a good part of these archives has been digitized by The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and that negotiations are "still ongoing" to acquire other funds.
The Shoah Memorial has deposited inthe National Archives of Morocco 373 photographs from different collections and coming from multiple sources: Judaica postcards evoking Jewish life in Morocco at the end of the 19th century, private photos of Moroccan Jewish families, press photos and photographic collections of Moroccan Jewish organizations such as the youth movement of the Éclaireurs Israélites de France or the OSE.
The Memorial also handed over a copy of its documentary archives relating to the situation of the Jews in Morocco during the Second World War. This collection represents 1048 documents from different collections: geographical collections of Morocco, funds of the General Commissariat for Jewish Questions, Maurice Vanikoff fund.
For her part, the French Minister of Culture, Françoise Nyssen, regretted the fact that "Jewish-Moroccan memory is today incomplete, mutilated and amputated" and that the archives are "scattered around the world and difficult to access", considering that this gift of archives to the Kingdom is able to allow one to know more about the Moroccan Jewish history of the last 150 years and to make it possible to write, from Morocco itself, the history of Moroccan Judaism.
The French minister in charge of European Affairs, Nathalie Loiseau, specified that the submitted archives concern two very important series of the history of the Moroccan Jewish community as well as files mainly coming from the cabinet of the General Resistance, of the Directorate of Political Affairs (1936-44), then of the Interior (1944-55) responsible for Jewish issues.
