2000 Jewish Pilgrims Visit Tunisia

Despite security concerns and opposition from some in Tunisia, some 2000 people visited the Ghriba synagogue on the island of Djerba in Tunisia, including Israelis who were allowed to enter the country, which has no diplomatic relations with Israel, on their Israeli passports for the first time. Jews have lived in Djerba since 500 BC, but the Jewish community has shrunk to 1500, down from 100,000 in the 1960s. Until 2000, thousands of Jews, many of them with ties to Tunisia, used to come to they synagogue every year. In 2002, Al-Qa’ida terrorists set off a bomb near the synagogue, killing 21 people, most of them German tourists. Djerba, with its beaches and olive groves, attracts hundreds of thousands of French and German tourists each year.