celebrated religious festivals together<\/a>. They also learned about Jewish religious practices and were keen to understand similarities and differences between religious practices. They asked why the Jews had left Mogador (in the 1950s and 60s) and how many remained. Only one Jewish family lives permanently in Essaouira today, although many diaspora visit regularly on religious or cultural occasions. Regine explained that although there was no animosity between Muslims and Jews in Mogador, following the fall of the French Protectorate in 1956, many Jewish families (who were often Francophone and allied with the French rulers) feared a resurgent nationalism and felt their future in Morocco was uncertain. Many migrated to the newly created state of Israel, but many left for other countries such as France, Canada (Quebec)\u00a0and the US.<\/p>\nFollowing a visit also to the renovated Rabbi Haim Pinto synagogue and an explanation of the renovation of\u00a0the Slat Lkhal synagogue, Regine guided the students through the mellah into the Kasbah, where they thanked their guides and expressed their appreciation of their multi-cultural introduction to Essaouira where they would spend one week as part of their studies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
On 14 July, HAF was pleased to welcome a group of US high school students, in Morocco to study Arabic to the site of our cultural heritage project\u00a0in Essaouira. Over the last months, HAF and partners have been working to rehabilitate the\u00a0Muslim,\u00a0Christian\u00a0and\u00a0Jewish\u00a0cemeteries of Essaouira. The group of 35 teenage students and their leaders, including Ms.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":20311,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[70],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/wordpress-haf.ddev.site\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/lgLRku2g.jpeg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress-haf.ddev.site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1919"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress-haf.ddev.site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress-haf.ddev.site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress-haf.ddev.site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress-haf.ddev.site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1919"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress-haf.ddev.site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1919\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20312,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress-haf.ddev.site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1919\/revisions\/20312"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress-haf.ddev.site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20311"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress-haf.ddev.site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1919"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress-haf.ddev.site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1919"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress-haf.ddev.site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1919"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}