בית קברות יהודי

This guide to the old Jewish cemetery in Casablanca opens with a Moroccan work crew ordered to clear a grave here in nineteen sixty-three, and the story still told among the city's Jews about what happened when they tried. It follows Rabbi Eliyahu HaCohen, known as the lamp of the city, buried among other venerated dead at El Bhira near the Gate of Marrakech, and the road authorities wanted cut straight through this ground. Look at the headstones around you, pale stone inscribed in French, Hebrew and Spanish, the handwriting of a community that once numbered in the tens of thousands here.