The Jewish Museum in Casablanca Morocco includes Jewish culture in school curricula
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| The Jewish Museum in Casablanca |
Morocco includes Jewish culture in school curricula
Even before announcing the normalization of its relations with Israel, Morocco launched a reform described by some as a "tsunami", which is the inclusion of a relative of the history and culture of the Jewish community in the curricula in the Kingdom
According to the Moroccan Ministry of Education, the first lessons in the Arabic language will be given as of the next semester in the last year of the primary stage, when the age of students is about 11 years
"The inclusion of this, the first in the Arab world, is like a tsunami," the Secretary-General of the Jewish community in Morocco said in a telephone conversation with Agence France-Presse in Casablanca
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| The Jewish Museum in CasablancaMorocco includes Jewish culture in school curricula |
The "Jewish tributary" of Moroccan culture appears in the arts of architecture, cooking and music, and is now present in the new curricula of civic education at the elementary level within a chapter dedicated to Sultan Syed Muhammad bin Abdullah, nicknamed Muhammad III (the eighteenth century)
This Alawite Sultan chose the port of Essaouira and its castle, which was built by Portuguese colonialists, to establish the city, which formed a diplomatic and commercial center, and by his payment it became the only city in the Islamic world that includes a Jewish majority, with the presence of 37 churches in it
Fouad Chafiqi, director of school programs at the Moroccan Ministry of Education, explained: "Although the Jewish presence in Morocco preceded the eighteenth century, the only reliable historical elements date back to this period"
In the Arab world, Morocco remains a rare case, as “this country has never erased the Jewish memory,” according to Zohoor Rehihel, curator of the Moroccan Jewish Museum in Casablanca, which is unique in the region
The Jews have been present in Morocco since ancient times and their number in this country is the largest among North African countries, and it has increased over the centuries, especially with the arrival of Jews expelled by the Catholic kings in Spain, starting in 1492
The number of the members of this community reached about 250,000 at the end of the forties of the last century, and at that time they constituted 10% of the total population. Many Jews left Morocco in 1948, dropping their number to three thousand.
The inclusion of the Jewish heritage in the Moroccan educational curriculum is part of a broad program of curricular reform that began in 2014
The reform, which did not receive much domestic comment, was welcomed by two Jewish societies based in the United States, the American "Sephardim Union" and the "Conference of Presidents"
It is worth noting that the Moroccan Minister of Education signed a partnership agreement with two Moroccan Jewish societies "to promote the concepts of tolerance, diversity and coexistence in school and university institutions"
In a symbolic gesture, the agreement was signed in the House of Memory in Essaouira, a museum dedicated to coexistence between Jews and Muslims, in the presence of the advisor to the Moroccan monarch André Azoulay, a Jew who devoted his life to promoting religious tolerance
MOHAMED NAJIB SAAAD
A Moroccan blogger from the outskirts of Ouarzazate, a lover of photography and everything related to informatics...
