Gesture of Witnessing. October 2019

Inside, the hospitality feels familiar. We sit together in a room covered with soft wool rugs, gathered around a small, round table. Mint tea, cornbread, almonds, and Argan butter are served. My Amazigh and *Derija* are broken, but I try to communicate, searching for words, using a dictionary app when necessary. This language, once the sound of my childhood home, was not something we were encouraged to preserve. As second-generation Moroccan immigrants, we wanted to belong in a Hebrew-speaking society that was hostile to our parents’ culture. But here, in this moment, my body remembers.

I have carried a hopeful desire to find more threads connecting me to my mother’s village, Ihoukarne, a small Amazigh village in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco. Today, it still feels like a place that exists between memory and disappearance, presence and absence.

When I first arrive in 2019, the village does not even appear on Google Maps. My mother and aunts guide me there through fragments of recollections—signs, directions, echoes of what they remember. I walk through the village, tracing the remnants of an Amazigh-Jewish community that once existed here, about fifteen families who lived in the mellah. Then, something unexpected happens.

An elderly man, in his nineties, is working in a field near the ruins of the mellah. There is something about him—something familiar yet distant. I decide, in an instinctive gesture, to FaceTime my mother. The man says he once knew the Jews who lived in the mellah, and I hope, somehow, that they might recognize one another. The conversation unfolds through exchanged names. At some point, he asks my mother about her family. She tells him she left the village as a child, then asks, “Do you know Ya’qub? Ya’qub Waaknin?” Instantly, he replies, “Yes, I know Ya’qub.” Then he asks, “Are you the daughter of Zahra?” My mother pauses. “Zahra was my grandmother.”