Tag: Israel

Mapping Moral Paths: The Spiritual Geography of Moroccan Rabbi Gabriel Elgrabli

ABSTRACT This essay offers a new reading of narratives of Jewish migration from the MENA region drawing on the preface to Tumat Yesharim (Jerusalem, 1989), a biblical exegesis by Rabbi Gabriel Elgrabli (spelled Eli-Qrabli). A Moroccan-born adherent of the (Anti-Zionist) Lithuanian Haredi Musar movement, Elgrabli engaged deeply with a tradition that emphasized ethical self-discipline. Composed in Israel of the 1980s, his autobiographical narrative charts a spiritual journey from Meknes to Jerusalem—through Europe and the Americas—in contrast to the singular path to the Holy Land that is often affirmed. As I argue, Elgrabli’s writing resists both Zionist cartographies that privilege Israel as an endpoint and the inward-facing, self-isolating path to perfection that the Musar model promotes. Instead, his journey exemplifies a diasporic spirituality rooted in displacement, divine providence, and ethical calling—a cartography animated not by destination but by personal transformation and ability to become a moral compass for the Sephardi grassroots. By weaving together Sephardi memory, Musar discipline, and geographic multiplicity, Elgrabli offers a unique model of mental maps. His account challenges dominant narratives of origin and return, presenting instead a layered map of spiritual becoming—rather than homecoming.

issue 27 / n.1 (2025) by Aviad Moreno

“From Egypt and Back”: Alternative Collective Memories among Egyptian Jews in Israel

ABSTRACT An analysis of the content and membership profile of the Facebook group “From Egypt and Back,” one of the biggest and most active groups of Egyptian Jews, in or out of social media, reveals the alternative that it has created to the dominant narrative in Egyptian Jewish collective memory, particularly in Israel. Whereas the dominant narrative has glorified the bourgeois, Frenchified, urban life of Egyptian Jews, “From Egypt and Back” has given voice to lower-middle-class and lower-class Jews and their experiences of Cairo, in particular. Its members have created a different mental map of Cairo that features its non-bourgeois neighborhoods, immersed in Egyptian-Arabic culture. This has generated high feelings of nostalgia, whose role as an emotion that affirms identity and cultural heritage, one that connects group members to their parents and family, and creates a community, will also be explored.

issue 27 / n.1 (2025) by Alon Tam

Wilhelma, Israel: An Interface of Israeli and German Settlement Histories

ABSTRACT The article deals with two settlements, Wilhelma and Atarot, whose histories are connected: the settlers of Wilhelma were deported by the British Mandate authorities in 1948 and became refugees, and the settlers of Atarot had to leave their settlement as it fell in the same year and also became refugees. They were re-settled in Wilhelma as it was vacated by the British. The German settlers of Wilhelma were deported to Australia where they were naturalized, mostly in Melbourne and Sydney. The name Wilhelma was replaced with Bnei Atarot by the Jewish settlers from Old Atarot.
The article opens with an introduction describing the relations between Jews and Germans in Palestine from the beginning of the German settlement until the Germans were forced to leave the country. It follows with an encounter with the Luz family, in Bnei Atarot and their narrative of the events that led to the evacuation of Old Atarot in 1948; the acts of settlement in Old Atarot and Wilhelma; the impact of the 1948 War of Independence on both communities, the heavy fighting in Atarot and Neve Yaakov; what happened to the lands of Wilhelma; and other Jewish refugees who joined for the re-settlement of Wilhelma. The article ends with an epilog, surveying the events in Old Atarot, to the cemeteries of Wilhelma and Old Atarot, and the Luxemburg Agreement (1952) and its significance to both communities.

issue 25 / n. 1 (2024) by Danny Goldman

The Expression of Israeli Southern Periphery’s Voices Through the Symbolism of Domestic versus Wild Animal

ABSTRACT
This article focuses on the animal symbolism used for representing the local identity of the southern periphery in Israel. From an ecocritical point of view, the domestic and the wild animal images will be analyzed as expressions of different shades (domestication and wildness) in the category of Nature, on the Nature-Culture dichotomy. The anthropological research method of discourse analysis has been adapted here to review the domestic donkey’s image in Sami Berdugo’s novel, Donkey (2019), and the discourse on the wild ass’s image in the media and especially by activists from the Negev. While the representation of the two types of animals raises awareness of the existential problems of southern periphery’s inhabitants, it also exposures nuances in their social status and the local identity reconstruction process.

issue 23 / n.1 (2023) by Ilanit Ben-Dor Derimian