The El Ghriba synagogue on the Tunisian island of Djerba is, by tradition, the oldest synagogue in Africa, and the centre of one of the last Jewish communities in the Arab world still living where it always has.
A founding story it never needed proven
The community holds that the synagogue was founded in 586 BCE by priests fleeing the destruction of the First Temple in Jerusalem, who brought with them a door and a stone from it, a founding story that cannot be demonstrated and that the community has never needed demonstrated. The documentary record of Jewish life on Djerba begins with letters of the Cairo Geniza around 1030 CE, and the present building dates only from the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, standing where earlier synagogues stood. Its name, "the marvel" or "the stranger", attaches to a further cluster of legends.
The pilgrimage
El Ghriba is the focus of an annual pilgrimage, held around the festival of Lag ba-Omer, that draws Jews from Djerba, from the Tunisian diaspora and from abroad to the synagogue, making it one of the principal Jewish pilgrimage sites of North Africa. The interior, tiled and hung with lamps, and the tradition of leaving petitions, particularly by women hoping for children, give the pilgrimage its distinctive character.
A remnant community
Around a thousand to fifteen hundred Jews remain on Djerba, from a Tunisian community that numbered perhaps a hundred thousand before the emigrations that followed 1948, which makes the island one of the very few places in the Arab world with a continuous, living Jewish community rather than only monuments. The pilgrimage has been targeted by attacks, and it continues under heavy protection, an emblem of both the endurance and the vulnerability of the community.