Les 12 Enfants du rabbin

It is a unique portrait of a Moroccan-Jewish family made of 12 children; they are nowadays scattered around the world, half live in Israel, the other half in the U.S. and my father in Switzerland. It is a film about destiny, and the ties between history and destiny. How do these narratives overlap and how have they shaped the story of my family? How does a family of 12 Jewish children from Marrakech, whose father was a Rabbi, and whose mother spoke only dialectal Judeo-Arabic and could not write nor read, keeps ties and deals nowadays with their Moroccan past, the perpetuation of their Jewish heritage, the law of their father, and the consequences of an emigration that scattered them around the world? Moreover, what prompted the departure of the Moroccan-Jews: Their messianic aspirations to go back to Zion? The creation of the State of Israel in 1948? The rise of pan-Arabism? The film looks at some of the following questions, through the testimonies of my father, and my 11 uncles and aunts. The Rabbi’s 12 children is a story of dislocation, fragmentation telling of family bonds and mythologies, framed in the historical context of the Moroccan-Jewish alyah. It is a story of hopes and disappointments, shedding a light on the messianic promises the Moroccan-Jews carried in their hearts when they arrived in Israel and the failure of their dreams and aspirations.Nowadays, the brothers and sisters live significantly different lives, all along the social, political, religious, and emotional spectrum. Their story is a universal immigrant’s story, and even more, a quintessential Jewish immigrant’s story: made up of exile, fragmentation, bonds, guilt, and the mythology of the Promised Land. It sheds a particular light onto the history of Zionism and Jewish history in the second half of the twentieth century.