Morocco hopes its improved ties with Israel and centuries-old Jewish history will help it offset some of the tourist trade it has lost to the global pandemic by bringing a surge of Israeli visitors once flights restart.

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The two countries agreed in December to resume diplomatic ties and relaunch direct flights – part of a deal brokered by the United States that also includes Washington's recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara.

"I was quite afraid to go previously, because it's an Arab country, even though I was told that tours there were fine. Now that there is peace, I think I can go without fear," said retired Israeli teacher Rivka Sheetrit, 69, who wants to see where her parents once lived and her forefathers were buried.

"When the skies reopen, I plan to go," she said.

Morocco was home to one of the largest and most prosperous Jewish communities in North Africa and the Middle East for centuries until 1948. As Jews fled or were expelled from many Arab countries, an estimated quarter of a million left Morocco for Israel from 1948-1964.

Today only about 3,000 Jews remain in Morocco, while hundreds of thousands of Israelis claim some Moroccan ancestry.

More than other countries in the region where the issue is often taboo, Morocco has sought in recent years to recognize the Jewish role in its history. In 2010, it launched a program to restore synagogues, Jewish cemeteries and heritage sites, and reinstated the original names of some Jewish neighborhoods.

Though the numbers of Israeli visitors are likely to be small compared to the total pre-COVID-19 tourist flow to Morocco, it could help a sector battered by the pandemic.

Tourism Minister Nadia Fettah Alaoui has said she expects 200,000 Israeli visitors in the first year following the resumption of direct flights. That compares to about 13 million yearly foreign tourists before the pandemic. Tourism revenue fell by 53.8% to 36.3 billion dirhams ($3.8 billion) in 2020.

In the pretty Moroccan port town of Essaouira, once home to a big Jewish community and still the location of several important shrines, tourism businesses are poised for a boost.

Ayoub Souri, who has a woodcraft shop near a Jewish museum, expects business to thrive: "We look forward to receiving more Jewish tourists after the normalization deal," he said.

Though a small number of Israeli tourists already come to Morocco, many have been put off by the lack of direct flights and diplomatic ties. The head of the Israeli liaison office in Rabat, which reopened after the deal, said he expected flights to resume next month.

"This is the main reason the number of Israeli tourists will increase significantly," the liaison chief, David Govrin, said.

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Morocco's tourism promotion office has commissioned a study on attracting tourists from Israel.

Henri Abizker, a Jewish community leader and businessman in Rabat who owns a travel agency organizing tours for Israelis, said he was even more optimistic about the numbers, predicting up to 400,000 would come.

Morocco is attractive because of its particular Jewish history as home to pilgrimage sites, attracting tourism that could benefit specialist operators.

"Younger generations tend to be more liberal, but Orthodox Jews insist on kosher requirements," he said.

In Israel, Haim Peretz, an Israeli of Jewish Moroccan descent who now works as a tour guide, said potential tourists were mainly waiting for direct flights.

"We expect, in principle, that demand for tourism in Morocco will grow," he said.

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A Palestinian family has turned a Second Temple-era site near the Hermesh settlement in northern Samaria into a residential building, an NGO that aims to protect Israel's national lands and resources announced this week. 

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Over the years, several mikvehs and underground complexes dating back to the Second Temple have been discovered in the area around Hermesh, as well as buildings from the Ottoman period.

According to the group Regavim, the family took over one of the ancient structures, which had already been declared an archeological site, and turned it into a private residence. 

Video: Regavim

Archeological remnants were discovered on a nearby hill as well, which experts believe to be part of the "industrial" area of the ancient city of Peresh. 

Regavim was conducting infrastructure work on top of the hill when its members discovered that the family had turned the cave into their home. The IDF Civil Administration has submitted a request to remove the eviction order arrives. 

"This is an ongoing case of incompetence and lack of enforcement," Regavim Spokesperson Avraham Binyamin explained. 

Palestinians have a history of taking over heritage sites, he said. If the "invaders are not completely expelled from the area, these enforcement actions have no meaning," Binyamin said, warning that Palestinians would continue to destroy evidence of Jewish history in these locations.  

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Dr. Ilia Lurie, a researcher with the organization, told Israel Hayom, "We knew that there was an old grave dating back to 1520 in the Ukrainian town of Busk. The cemetery was apparently built at the end of the 15^th century."

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The representatives of Jewish Galicia & Bukovina (JCB) were joined by local activists and students from the Herzog College in Jerusalem who have completed a course on European Jewry. Alongside the grave whose existence they were aware of, they were surprised to discover 10 more graves and headstones, which Lurie describes as a "rare find."

"The headstones we discovered were from the 16^th century, which was known for riots that destroyed a lot of Jewish symbols and remains," Lurie explained.

Thus far, JCB – whose purpose is to document and make accessible the historic legacy of Jews from Galicia and Bukovina – has documented 15 Jewish cemeteries. These comprise only a small part of the total cemeteries and headstones that existed in these areas. The rest are believed to have been lost.

"Most of the cemeteries were demolished, mainly during the Holocaust, but also under the Soviets, who used the headstones as building materials and to pave roads. Some were even used as foundations for different memorial sites – including one to Lenin," Lurie said.

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But slowly, the oldest Jewish cemetery in Cuba is beginning to be rehabilitated, along with the memory of many of the island's early Jewish forebears.

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The restoration is the result of an initiative by the government-run city historian's office to spruce up Havana ahead of the 500th anniversary of its founding in November. Across the city, streets are being paved, monuments are being polished and historic sites are being restored.

There is also an effort to recover long-forgotten sites – among them the almost completely neglected Jewish cemetery in the Guanabacoa neighborhood on Havana's east side.

"I feel very great peace and calmness when I visit the cemetery. … For me it's like being with my mother, my only sister and my nephew," Adela Dworin, president of the Hebrew Board of Cuba, said standing beside a grave adorned with small rocks that are used by Jews to pay homage to the dead.

The rocks, which are believed to symbolize eternity, lie near inscriptions bearing names of the buried. Many have words of consolation written in Yiddish or Spanish and are adorned with the Star of David.

"The people buried here escaped fascism during the war. They're the founders of the community who bought these lands to make it a cemetery," said David Prinstein, vice president of the Hebrew board. "It has historical and sentimental value."

For many years, he said, the Jewish community was unable to raise the $200,000 needed to completely overhaul the grounds. Jews in the US contributed to the upkeep of some burial plots, but the cemetery as a whole was largely left to deteriorate.

Pilar Vega, an engineer in the historian's office, told local TV there are about 1,100 grave sites in the cemetery. About 50 have been repaired and 150 more are expected to be cleaned up before the end of this year, she said. She didn't say whether the entire cemetery would be refurbished, though she added that a special room where bodies are ritually washed and dressed according to Jewish burial rites has also been fixed up.

Vega didn't say how much the state has spent on the project.

The restoration effort in Havana comes as Cuba finds itself struggling with a severe economic crisis, which experts have blamed on a combination of a Trump administration trade embargo and the halt of Venezuelan shipments of subsidized fuel that Cuba used to generate electricity and earn hard currency on the open market. The country's lack of liquidity has now made it difficult to pay creditors and suppliers, resulting in a shortage of basic products like chicken and flour.

Over the years, the Jewish community has not been immune to the island's political ups-and-downs.

Many Jewish families left the country after the 1959 revolution, leaving behind their dead in accordance with Jewish custom that prohibits bodies from being exhumed unless they are taken to Israel. Others abandoned their religious traditions amid the deep secularism that took hold during the first few years of the Castro government. Some Jews moved to Israel amid the periodic economic crunches in the ensuing decades.

"Families leave and many even forget those left here," lamented Prinstein, who said the cemetery had also been looted throughout the decades of neglect.

It was not until the 1990s that Judaism on the island regained strength, partly due to the efforts of a noted surgeon, José Miller. He helped Jews scattered throughout Cuba reconnect with their roots at a time that the communist government discouraged religious denominations. Miller, who died in 2006, is buried in a prominent place in the cemetery.

Some 1,500 Jews live in Cuba now, most of them elderly.

Land for the cemetery in Guanabacoa was bought in 1906 by members of the island's first Hebrew society. It was inaugurated in 1910 by Jews and their descendants from Central and Eastern Europe, many of whom fled persecution in the period between World Wars I and II.

The cemetery also has a 3-meter (10-foot) monument paying tribute to the 6 million Jews who died in the Holocaust. A half dozen bars of soap that the Nazis made with human fat from the concentration camps are buried nearby.

Dworin, who lost nearly her entire family during World War II, said she was a schoolgirl in Cuba when the memorial was inaugurated in 1947. Her parents had left a small town in modern-day Poland before war erupted in 1939, but her grandmother and uncles stayed behind, she said.

On a recent day, a group of workers' scrubbed tombstones and reconstructed various installations at the cemetery. Other repairs have also become more visible such as a paved street nearby.

"We are not the country's only problem. There are many places that require the attention of the historian's office, so we are eternally grateful for their interest and friendship to the Jewish people," Dworin said.

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