Moroccan king to launch 'council of Jewish community in Morocco'

After weeks of recovering from an illness, Morocco's King Mohammed VI made a comeback on Wednesday in a highly-anticipated governmental meeting.

The meeting revealed the establishment of several new institutions, namely the national council of the Jewish community in Morocco.

"These measures are based on the supreme responsibility incumbent on His Majesty the King in His capacity as Emir Al-Mouminine and guarantor of the free exercise of worship for all Moroccans," said the royal palace in an official statement published by the state-agency Moroccan Arab Press (MAP).

The soon-to-be-inaugurated council will be in charge of the management of the Moroccan Jewish community’s "common affairs and the safeguarding of the cultural and religious influence of Judaism in the Kingdom," announced the palace on Wednesday.

Once counting a quarter a million, the Jewish community in Morocco played a key role in influencing culture, music, tradition, and politics.

Today, around 3,000 Moroccan Jews are based in the Kingdom.

The new council will be also in charge of consolidating ties of Moroccan Jews abroad with their country of origin. It will be integrated into the ministry of interior.

Between 1940 and 1960, more than 300,000 Moroccan Jews immigrated to Israel, taking the tradition with them. Today, about one million Jews of Moroccan origins live in Israel.

In 2019, as reports about an expected deal between Rabat and Tel Aviv started surfacing, King Mohammed VI instructed the Minister of the Interior to organize elections for representative bodies of Moroccan Jewish communities. 

An election was last held in the kingdom in 1969.

Since the formal launch of Moroccan-Israeli normalisation late in 2020, Rabat had actively relied on the Jewish-Moroccan cultural asset.

In May, the Jewish museum Bayt Dakira in Essaouira hosted Mimouna's celebrations - a Moroccan-Jewish ceremony - under the presence of Israeli officials during the event has triggered an outcry.

The celebrations at the time triggered much controversy with many pro-Palestine activists accusing Rabat of "brownwashing the Apartheid state".

Besides the military cooperation between the two countries, Tel Aviv and Rabat have started recently strengthening their "cultural and educational normalisation."

Several student exchanges occurred in the last months between the two states. Most recently, five PhD Moroccan students arrived this week at the university Ben Gurion in the Negev.

On the first of July, the Moroccan Observatory Against Normalisation flagged several "Israeli infiltrations and deceptions by the so-called scientific and research activities organised by officers and leaders in the Zionist army in a number of Moroccan campuses."

Morocco's ministry of education has not reacted to the observatory’s statements yet.