Jews lived in the region of Agadir for centuries. In the valley of the Souss and along the Atlantic coast, small communities of merchants, craftsmen and men of letters were an integral part of the life of southern Morocco.
In the modern town that grew from the 1920s (around the port, at Founti and on the hill of Talborjt), the Jewish community of Agadir numbered more than three thousand people and had three synagogues, schools, a yeshiva and a cemetery.
As for the tsaddik of the city, Rabbi Khalifa ben Malka, he had rested since 15 August 1760 along the oued Talaininte El Ghezouat, before his grave was moved, on 4 July 1946, under rabbinical supervision, to the centre of the present cemetery.
29 February 1960
At twenty to midnight, on Monday 29 February 1960, an earthquake of magnitude 5.7 on the Richter scale struck Agadir.
In some fifteen seconds, Founti, Talborjt, the Kasbah and a great part of the new town collapsed.
Between twelve and fifteen thousand people died, more than 1,500 of them Jews. It remains one of the deadliest earthquakes of the twentieth century.
The Jewish community was struck at its heart: whole families were buried under the rubble of their houses. Other victims, who could not be identified, were laid in the common grave facing the European cemetery of Tildi, five hundred metres further south. Most of the identified Jewish victims rest in this cemetery, which makes the place one of the chief witnesses to the tragedy that struck the community.
The city was declared unsafe and rebuilt two kilometres further south.
The survivors of the Jewish community, many of whom had lost everything, left in the months and years that followed for Casablanca, Israel, Canada or France.
Within a few years the Jewish community of Agadir shrank sharply, down to about 300 people by the middle of the 1980s, and fewer than a hundred today.
This site
After a first and salutary effort undertaken by Georges Sebat in the 2000s, Robert Cabessa and Michael Sicsu set out, in 2025, to create this site dedicated to the memory of the cemetery, to take the photographs and to index every grave.
The contribution of Yahasra.org, offering in particular an innovative artificial intelligence, made it possible to complete and enrich this work of memory. The AI built into Yahasra can "read" the graves and match the Hebrew dates with those of the Gregorian calendar, for a more precise search.
A visitor book now gathers and holds fast the memories and the feelings of the old people of the town as well as of its visitors. The "Tree of Life", for its part, will let families be told two weeks in advance of the hazkarot of their kin.
Finally, an algorithm for classifying Moroccan Jewish family names, developed by Dr Yohanan Ouaknine, will let visitors obtain intuitive answers to their searches, in particular by taking account of the different spellings of one and the same name, such as Levy, Levi, Halioui or Halevy.
This site holds a great part of the memory of our community. We shall see that it is kept with the same care and the same respect as the cemetery itself.
Michael Sicsu & Robert Cabessa
תהא נשמתם צרורה בצרור החיים
May their souls be bound up in the bond of life.