feature
Interior of La Ghriba
Synagogue, Djerba, Tunisia
‘JEWISH LIFE GOES ON’:
Ron Kampeas | JTA.org
T he day after a gunman killed four people
outside an ancient place of Jewish worship on
the Tunisian island of Djerba, men gathered in
the same synagogue not to mourn, but to celebrate.

They were there to witness the blessing of a new
life: a brit milah, or ritual circumcision. Not long after,
a recording of the ceremony, complete with the men
chanting in Hebrew as they surrounded the eight-
day-old baby, made its way to the phone of Isaac
Choua, a Sephardic rabbi living in New York.

For Choua, watching the ceremony was a relief from
the horrors that had emerged the day before, when
a rogue security official at the Tunisian synagogue
killed two Jewish cousins, Aviel Haddad, 30, and
Benjamin Haddad, 43, as well as two security guards
before being gunned down.

20 MAY 18, 2023 | JEWISH EXPONENT
“Something beautiful happened,” said Choua, the
Middle East and North Africa communities liaison for
the World Jewish Congress, in an interview. “They
had a brit milah in Djerba, even with all the chaos.

Jewish life goes on.”
The May 9 deadly shooting came during the
Hiloula, an annual pilgrimage and celebration of
Jewish sages held on or around Lag b’Omer, which
takes place a little more than a month after the
beginning of Passover. The annual festivity attracts
thousands of Jews from around the world, many
of Tunisian descent. It is held at the El Ghriba
synagogue — a 19th-century building constructed
on a site believed to have been a Jewish house of
worship for as long as 2,500 years.

The pilgrimage has grown substantially in recent
years, after trepidation following an attack on the
synagogue by Al-Qaeda in 2002 that killed 20
people, and a suspension of the pilgrimage in 2011
amid security concerns in the wake of the Arab
Spring, which began in Tunisia.

The Tunisian government has invested in the
pilgrimage, billing it as a symbol of the country’s
tolerance, and has provided intense security. Last
year, Tunisia was one of six African countries that
signed the “Call of Rabat,” an initiative of the American
Sephardi Federation that sought a commitment to
preserving Jewish heritage on the continent.

Jason Guberman, the executive director of the
American Sephardi Federation, said the numbers
that the Hiloula attracts today have not yet reached
the 10,000 or so who attended before the 2002
attack. The Arab Spring and COVID-19 pandemic,
he said, “have also deterred pilgrims in the past
decade.” He estimated that fewer than 5,000 people
attend annually now.

Additionally, Tunisia’s authoritarian president Kais
Saied remains unfriendly to Israel and has rebuffed
Hasan Mrad/DeFodi Images via Getty Images via JTA.org
Djerba Jews and Their Supporters Show
Resilience After Deadly Attack



feature
Courtesy of Chrystie Sherman/Diarna Geo-Museum of North African & Middle Eastern Jewish Life via JTA.org
Jewish pilgrims at the Ghriba
synagogue in Tunisia’s southern
resort island of Djerba on May 8
efforts by successive American administrations to join
the Abraham Accords, the normalization agreements
between Israel and several Arab countries.

Djerba, nonetheless, remains an oasis of
coexistence, said Yaniv Salama, the CEO of the
Salamanca Foundation, which seeks to reinvigorate
Jewish communities in Muslim lands.

“You have to understand something about
Djerba,” Salama said. “The community there has
very, very deep ties with the local municipalities.

Everything is done in conjunction — there are joint
[security] watches” between the Jewish and larger
communities, “and joint communication between the
Jewish community leaders and the local police.”
Jason Isaacson, the American Jewish Committee’s
chief policy and political affairs officer, who has
frequently visited Djerba, said it was significant that
two Tunisian security officials died protecting the
Jewish community.

“It’s obviously now going to be a source of shame
for the country that this happened, within its own
military forces, but this happens within military
forces” everywhere, he said. “The fact that the
country deploys a huge protective cordon around
the synagogue and around the festivities and around
the worshipers who come, to assure that it all goes
off smoothly and proper in a celebratory spirit,
is significant.”
Aaron Zelin, a senior fellow at the Washington
Institute for Near East Policy think tank whose
expertise is Islamist extremism in Tunisia, said the
attack appeared to be an outlier, unlike the carefully
planned 2002 attack.

“It wasn’t really a sophisticated attack,” Zelin said.

“So it’s plausible it could have just been one person
that just decided to do something on their own accord,
and there wasn’t some broader plot or planning in the
same way.”
Choua said the Tunisian Jewish Diaspora would
not be deterred. “Jewish Tunisians are still going to
either visit family [or] visit this pilgrimage site,” he
said. “Jews are resilient.”
Djerba has the attention of the world, at least for
the moment. The day before the attack, Deborah
Lipstadt, the U.S. envoy monitoring antisemitism,
alongside U.S. Ambassador to Tunisia Joey Hood,
joined Tunisian officials in a ceremony launching
the Hiloula.

“I am sickened and heartbroken by the lethal,
antisemitic attack targeting the Ghriba synagogue
in Djerba during the Lag B’Omer celebrations, with
thousands of Jewish pilgrims in attendance,” Lipstadt
said on Twitter.

That may be the silver lining, the World Jewish
Congress’s Choua said: The predominantly Ashkenazi
Jewish Diaspora tends to forget the communities
that persist outside the Western world.

“The Jewish world is noticing that there’s still
Jews in the Middle East and North Africa,” he
said. “This might even spark more tourism in the
country itself.”
Salama said he did not expect the community
of about 1,400 people, which includes several
institutes of religious learning, to be broken following
the attack.

“They’ll do their grieving and they’ll continue,
they’ll push forward,” he said. “They really have got
a stiff upper lip.”
Robert Ejnes, the executive director of CRIF, the
umbrella body for French Jewry, said the French
Jewish community is close to the Tunisian Jewish
community because France colonized the country
beginning in the 1800s, and because the community
speaks French. He said that the Hiloula attracts
French Jews of all ethnic origins.

“It’s really affecting the whole of the community
of France because on the Hiloula, there are a lot of
people going [from] the French Jewish community of
all origins,” he said.

Ejnes found it notable that even after the attack,
French Jews who attended the Hiloula posted
photos of the festivities on social media. He said he
expected the same number of people to attend next
year’s Hiloula.

“People will be resilient,” he said. “They posted
pictures of them[selves] at the Ghriba, saying, ‘We’ll
be back.’” ■
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