Saving the city: Casamémoire and the 2021 plan

A hundred-year-old building does not survive on its own. It stands because people decide that it must stand — and, in Casablanca, that decision took time to become a collective one.

1995: Casamémoire

The Casablanca association Casamémoire was founded in 1995, with an aim simple to state and hard to hold to: to have the buildings of the twentieth century recognised as heritage — the very ones that were being demolished without a qualm because they seemed too recent to be historic.

Two years later, in 1997, the Moroccan Jewish Museum opened in a former orphanage, under the aegis of the ONA. It remains, to this day, a singular institution in the Arab world.

What has been saved — and what has not

The losses are real. The villa that Marius Boyer had built in 1928 for Raphaël Bénazéraf has gone; other buildings in the centre have suffered the same fate over the decades.

Witnesses have nonetheless come through the century: the Ettedgui synagogue, in the old town, has been restored; the Benaroch synagogue survives in the Lusitania district; and the schools built by the Suraqui brothers are part of this inherited landscape.

2017-2021: a plan, at last

A preservation initiative was launched in 2017, and then a plan was put into effect in 2021. The figures deserve to be read twice: of some ten thousand buildings recorded as belonging to the modern heritage, about two thousand enjoy protection.

In other words: one in five. For the rest, everything still depends on the vigilance of the residents, the associations and the owners.

Why this concerns us

The Immeuble Assayag belongs to exactly this category: a twentieth-century building, lived in and alive, whose value lies not only in its age but in what it has to tell — a commissioning client, an architect, a city that was learning to build high.

To document, to photograph, to publish: this too is a way of protecting. If you hold archives or memories connected with the building, write to us — every item added to the file counts.

Source: Jean-Louis Cohen, “Casablanca la juive: Public and Private Architecture 1912-1960”, Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History (Fondazione CDEC).