The Jewish community of Rabat, Morocco dwindled at the beginning of the 21st century. Documents were scattered across the city in abandoned synagogues, empty apartments and shuttered schools. The community decided to collect these materials in 2005, following the established Jewish custom of treating sacred texts as human bodies meriting interment in a genizah, a grave or mausoleum designated for the burial of religious documents.
Join Dr. Oren Kosansky of the Rabat Genizah Project (and Lewis and Clark College) for a talk about his experiences with the storage and disposal of Judaism’s most prized possessions.
The Rabat Genizah Project brings together an international team of community representatives, scholars, archivists, and information technologists to develop a digital archive of Moroccan Jewish documents. The genizah repository is housed at the Casablanca Jewish Museum in Morocco. The collection includes community records, photographs, public notices, pedagogical materials, poetic manuscripts, canonical Jewish texts, rabbinical commentaries, liturgical supplements, and a wide range of other published and unpublished materials.