Jewish Cemetery in Marrakech (Morocco)

Feeling a call to my roots, I visited the Jewish cemetery in Marrakech this evening. It is vast, the largest in Morocco, and has been in continuous use since 1537. Many of the graves are similar to old Moroccan graves we’d seen - long white stones often unmarked, that look to us like the concrete block that marks the end of a parking space. When this cemetery was started, there were 35,000 Jews living in Marrakech. Many had come over from Spain at the invitation of the Sultan when the Catholic kings of Spain expelled the Jews. This graveyard has so many stories. Even though many are unmarked, somebody visits them because I saw the stones left on them (a Jewish tradition). Some had many stones. Some did have inscriptions in Hebrew or some in French. A row of graves were all pre-teens who had died in 1959, perhaps some epidemic. Some extra large monuments indicated revered rabbis. The stories this place could tell!