The Moroccan “Yizkor Book”: Holocaust Memory, Intra-Jewish Marginalization, and Communal Empowerment in Israel

Abstract

The writing of “Yizkor books” (Yizker bikher, רעכיב רוכזי)—memorial books for European Jewish communities that were destroyed in the Holocaust—has developed and expanded as the remnants of these lost communities scattered around the globe in the post-war era. The motives for writing comparable books among non-European Jewish communities—which experienced different circumstances of dispersal but were still influenced by Holocaust memory—and the way these books nourished the intentional creation of immigrant communities, are understudied. This article focuses on the related genre of what we define as community-oriented autobiographical memoirs penned by Moroccan Jews who migrated to Israel in the 1950s. Within these books, we trace patterns of narration and memory construction utilized by Moroccan leaders in an effort to cope with the stereotyping and exclusion of their communities from mainstream culture by the Ashkenazi-European elite in Israel. We explore how these narratives by Moroccan immigrants were, on the one hand, inspired by commonplace Israeli Holocaust memories depicting the traumatic annihilation of Jewish life in Morocco, and, on the other hand, accounts of Moroccan marginality in Israel.