Israir announced will begin direct flights from Ben-Gurion International Airport to Marrakech, Morocco, starting on July 19, the airline announced Tuesday.

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Israir said it planned to operate five direct flights between Tel Aviv and Marrakech weekly.

"We estimate that demand will be high and that hundreds of thousands of passengers from Israel will visit the destination as part of vacation packages or as part of tour packages," Israir VP of marketing Gil Stav said.

Israel and Morocco agreed in December to resume diplomatic relations and relaunch direct flights  as part of a deal brokered by the United States that also included Washington's recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara.

Morocco was once home to one of the largest and most prosperous Jewish communities in North Africa and the Middle East for centuries until Israel's founding in 1948. As Jews fled or were expelled from many Arab countries, an estimated 250,000 Jews left Morocco for Israel from 1948 to 1964.

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

In March, Moroccan Tourism Minister Nadia Fettah Alaoui said she expected 200,000 Israeli visitors in the first year following the resumption of direct flights. Morocco's tourism revenue dropped over 53% in 2020 and 2021 due to the COVID pandemic.

El Al, Israel's national air carrier, also said Tuesday that it hoped to start direct flights to Morocco in July and that it was now awaiting final approval from Moroccan and Israeli authorities.

This article was first published by i24NEWS.

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On the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day 2021, some 174,500 Holocaust survivors are living in Israel, according to data from the Holocaust Survivors' Rights Authority in the Social Equality Ministry released Tuesday.

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Since Holocaust Remembrance Day in 2020, which fell after the COVID pandemic reached Israel and was most fatal to older Israelis, 14,264 survivors have died, an average of 41 per day.

At the beginning of 2020, the government counted some 192,000 survivors living in Israel, a number that for the first time included Jews from North Africa and the Middle East who were victims of persecution linked to the Nazis.

According to the ministry data, 83% of the survivors are over 80, with an average age of 84.5. Another 18%, some 31,000, are over 90, and 900 have reached 100. Some 60% of the survivors recognized by the authority are women.

Slightly over two-thirds (64%) were born in Europe, with natives of the former USSR comprising 36%. Another 12% (25,00) were born in Romania; and 5.5% (9,600) were born in Poland. Nearly 10,000 others were born in Bulgaria, Hungary, and Germany.

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Thirty-six percent of the survivors were born in Asia and north Africa, including 32,000 Jews from Morocco and Algeria who were targeted by antisemitic attacks and various restrictions under the Vichy regime. Another 11% were born in Baghdad and experienced the riots that spread through Iraq in mid-1941, and 7% were born in Tunisia and Libya, both of which enacted race laws and sent Jews to forced labor camps.

Haifa is home to the largest population of survivors: 12,100, followed by Jerusalem (10,800), Tel Aviv (9,500), Ashdod (8,700), Netanya (8,500), Beersheba (7,600), Petah Tikva (7,000), and Rishon Lezion (6,900).

According to the numbers, there were 14.8 million Jews in the world in 2019, 1.8 million fewer than in 1939 on the eve of World War II, and 3.3 million more than there were in 1948.

Israel remains the country with the largest number of Jews in the world (6.8 million), followed by the United States (5.7 million), France (448,000), and Canada (393,000).

Israel's Holocaust Remembrance Day celebrations begin on the evening of Wednesday, April 7, 80 years after the start of the Holocaust.

State events begin with a ceremony at Yad Vashem Memorial in Jerusalem at 8 p.m. Both President Reuven Rivlin and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will participate.

This article was first published by i24NEWS.

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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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The Center for Middle Eastern Classical Music, which has been active in Jerusalem for the last 25 years under the auspices of the Education Ministry as an advanced arts school, has begun awarding academic credit for its theoretical courses covering classical music from a variety of near eastern cultures – Persia, Turkey, India, Greece, and North Africa, meaning that for the first time in Israel, students can earn a BA in this often-overlooked musical genre

The courses cover flamenco music and a range of subgenres of Jewish music.

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Since it was founded, the center taught hundreds of students who went on to play and teach traditional forms of middle eastern or oriental music.

Dr. Avi Shoshani, founder and director of the Center for Middle Eastern Classical Music, told Israel Hayom, "Who would have believed we'd see this joyful day for middle eastern culture and those who take an interest in the near eastern culture that is precious to them. You have to understand that classical oriental music is an expression of the oriental spirit, which is different from the western one."

"Instruments and styles of singing that have been forgotten in Israel since the state was founded have been resurrected thanks to the center's activity. Including classical middle eastern music in the canon of Israeli culture allows for a more pluralistic society that includes all its tribes and creates solidarity and unity between everyone," Shoshani said.

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Mounir Baatour hopes to change perceptions in the conservative North African country, where homosexuality is punishable by up to three years in jail.

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"I will open a debate about LGBT rights," the 48-year-old founder of Tunisia's leading LGBT+ rights group, Shams, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in a telephone interview.

"I saw there is no progress on this matter in Tunisia: there is no politician who is endorsing these cases and in my opinion I am the best person who can change the Tunisian society."

Convictions for same-sex relations rose by 60% last year to 127 from 79 in 2017, according to Shams, which documents arrests and cases. It recorded more than 25 convictions in the first quarter of 2019.

The country will hold a presidential election in November. The incumbent Beji Caid Essebsi, 92, has announced he will not run for a second term.

Baatour, from the small Tunisian Liberal Party, is an outsider who is unlikely to win, but his status as an openly gay presidential contender has brought him attention.

He argued that the next president should take action to improve LGBT+ rights whether or not it is supported by voters.

"It isn't a matter of acceptance by the population," he said, arguing the other changes such as a ban on polygamy in 1956 had been carried out without popular support.

"I think 60 years after independence we need to have the political will to impose reform and to tell the people that it is abnormal to put homosexual people into prison."

Fewer than half of African countries have legalized gay sex and only South Africa allows gay marriage, according to the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association (ILGA)

"I am a politician, I have a program, I am a Tunisian citizen and I have the right to be a candidate without a problem with my sexual orientation," he said.

The autumn parliamentary and presidential elections will be only the third set of polls in which Tunisians can vote freely following the 2011 revolution that toppled autocrat Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, who ruled for 23 years.

The North African state has been hailed as the Arab Spring,s only democratic success because protests toppled Ben Ali without triggering the violent upheaval seen in Syria and Libya.

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