Tunisia: the Ghriba synagogue, “a symbolic jewel” already attacked in the past

2023-05-10 18:11:43

New bloodbath at the Ghriba synagogue. This Tuesday evening, on the Tunisian island of Djerba, after killing one of his colleagues, a gendarme went near the religious site to open fire, killing another gendarme and two pilgrims. One of the victims is a Frenchman, the Tunisian Foreign Ministry said.

The Ghriba Synagogue has often been described as one of the last refuges of Arab Jews. A piece of land where Hebrew history and that of decolonization intersect. “It’s an architectural and symbolic jewel”, summarizes about this building the historian and researcher Marc Knobel. Built in the 6th century BC, this synagogue is considered the oldest in Africa.

Its history is accompanied by a few legends, dear to the heart of the Jewish community. One of them tells that, when the rabbis left Jerusalem, after the destruction of the Second Temple (Solomon’s temple), they would have taken with them the remains of the building which would be found today in the synagogue of the Ghriba.

A suicide bombing in 2002

Its location, on the island of Djerba, is not insignificant. The peninsula is home to 1,000 of the 1,300 to 1,500 Tunisian Jews (one of the last Arab Jewish communities) in the country. “At the time of independence, in 1956, many Jews who were French left Tunisia. Others left in 1967, after the Six Day War. But the Djerbian Jews have been there for 2,000 years and are very attached to their island, they would not have left it for anything in the world”, traces Marc Knobel. “In Tunis, Jewish synagogues and cemeteries are abandoned. This is not the case in Djerba. The community lives, has children, has its own businesses, its Talmudic schools,” he continues.

This Ghriba – a term which means “strange” in Arabic and which designates these few synagogues with a special status often located in rural villages in Tunisia, Algeria and Libya – also represents a strong marker of identity for Tunisian Jews because of the pilgrimage annual, which is organized there on the occasion of the Lag Ba’omer festival, after Passover. Every year, devotees from Europe, the United States and Israel come here.

But in recent years, the number of foreign pilgrims has decreased, particularly due to a suicide attack on the synagogue more than twenty years ago. On April 11, 2002, a natural gas tank truck filled with explosives blew up in front of the synagogue, killing 19 people and injuring around 30 people. The investigation conducted jointly by Tunisia, France and Germany will show that the attack was carried out by a 25-year-old Franco-Tunisian suicide bomber, a member of Al-Qaeda. Since then, Israel has advised its nationals not to travel to the eastern Tunisian island.

Before that, the place had been targeted by the charges of a Tunisian soldier, in 1985. While he was responsible for maintaining order, he had opened fire and killed five people, including four Jews. “In a context where Tunisia is in a chaotic state, I don’t know if, alas, tomorrow there will be Jews in the country,” worries Marc Knobel, the day after this new deadly attack.