We already knew the enthusiasm of the Israelis for the Moroccan electronic visa, and for good reason it was followed last July by a large flow of tourists to Morocco for the summer period. Now the trend is to demand Moroccan nationality from descendants of expatriate Jewish Moroccans who claim the nationality of their ancestors.
The attachment of Moroccan Jews to their country of origin is indisputably manifest. André Azoulay Advisor to the King and Founding President of the Essaouira Mogador association, recently welcomed a group of a hundred Jewish students of Moroccan descent from Montreal, Canada, visiting Bayt Dakira (House of Memory), a Jewish museum located in the heart of the medina of the city of Essaouira invited precisely by Bayt Dakira for a unique trip to Morocco, the country of origin of their parents and grandparents.
The goal is to introduce them to the history and cultural richness of the Kingdom, the land of their ancestors who saw the birth and growth of their parents and grandparents. André Azoulay said he was moved by the presence of this youth eager to know the origin of his ancestors. ” We are there, in Bayt Dakira at the time when a hundred young people whose parents are Moroccans came for a visit, had their grandparents on the telephone and they spoke to me, saying to me, this is my granddaughter, this is my grandson, it’s very moving,” he asserted.
This sense of belonging to the Moroccan nation continues to grow among the second and third generations of expatriate Jews of Moroccan origin, said Serge Berdugo, Secretary General of the Council of Jewish Communities of Morocco.
That said, Israeli citizens of the diaspora, descendants of Moroccan Israelites who left the Kingdom in the 1950s and after Morocco’s independence, are more and more numerous to file applications in the Kingdom’s consulates abroad for obtain Moroccan nationality. In the game of counting, there are many Israelis of Moroccan origin who claim to obtain a Moroccan passport.
According to the latest census in Israel, there are reports of approximately 800,000 Moroccan Jews living in the Jewish state, many of whom already have Moroccan nationality. And if we add to this the diaspora which amounts to more than 200,000 Israelis of Moroccan origin spread all over the world, but mainly in Europe, the United States, Canada… and elsewhere, many of them have acquired the nationality of their host country.
For contentious cases where the filiation of a Moroccan Jew is not obvious and clearly established, recourse to the rabbinical court of Casablanca is required, in the sense that all Moroccan Jews are duly archived there. The legal procedure is simple and short. The operation does not, in fact, exceed six months to become Moroccan again.