When we decided that we were going to spend Pesach in Marseille and the French Alps, I got straight to packing. Worrying less about snowpants and ski masks, I filled a full suitcase with the essentials: big, round shmura matzahs for the seders; Maxwell House Haggadahs; our carefully wrapped piece of Afikomen saved from last year to be ‘found’ and burned in the search for chametz; gluten-free matzahs; chocolate matzahs; regular matzahs; baked treats of all names, differing only in proportion of potato starch to sugar; and a bag of Manischewitz mini-marshmallows for the plague of hail.
‘There are Jews in France, you know,’ said my husband, fretting about the cost of extra baggage. ‘I think you’ll be able to buy all that stuff there.’ I said, ‘Yes, yes,’ all the while surreptitiously sliding a jar of Gefen applesauce into a side pocket of my bursting suitcase. After all, it wasn’t like we were going to Paris.
Anyway, buy kosher food in France? - the land of ‘laïcité,’ where a 2004 law banned the wearing of religious symbols in public schools; where even devout men doffed their kippahs for fear of antisemitic attacks; where politician Marine Le Pen (daughter of Holocaust denier Jean-Marie Le Pen and herself a formidable figure of the far right) had just been confirmed as one of the two finalist candidates in the French presidential election? Le Pen had already announced that if she won, ritual slaughter would be banned in France. I squeezed in a couple of Lieber chocolate bars beside the apple sauce.
Arriving at our Airbnb, we settled our kids into their rooms for the week and got to chatting with the owner, Maud, a blond, blue-eyed woman with a white lace blouse I coveted and a handful of yellow sticky notes with suggestions of where to go and what to see. Sizing her up, I decided it would be ok to ask a question that I would have been hesitant to ask a stranger in my own city in Britain. Something just felt right.
‘We are celebrating a Jewish festival,’ I said, ‘And we are wondering if there is an area of the city where maybe we could buy some kosher food.’ ‘Oh,’ said Maud airily, quickly penning instructions on a new sticky note. ‘You can go to the Carrefour in Place de 4 Septembre. They have a big kosher section.’ She pulled me toward the window, pointing to a long, tree-lined street. ‘Go there if you want to see a nice synagogue,’ she suggested. Then she gave us the name of guy who ran kayak trips from the Côte Bleu. Nothing about where to buy a blouse like hers, but on the whole, Maud was a goldmine when it came to information about Marseille-- even the Jewish bits.
Pleased that I’d be able to buy food for the seders, and with three days to go before the festival began, we began to explore the exciting, visibly multicultural (in fact, heavily North African), gloriously beautiful city of Marseille. I ran along the corniche, my Mediterranean soul delighting at the clear blue waters of the Mediterranean, my literary heart throbbing at the sight of Chateau D’If, where the Count of Monte Cristo was imprisoned, on an island off the coast.
We ate gelato at the port where seventy-three years ago my young father arrived, fleeing from his native country of Egypt (the irony of being in Marseille for the seders wasn’t lost on me; I was commemorating not only the departure of the Jews from Egypt on a grand, historical level, but also on a very personal one). We took a petit train to see the stunning Notre Dame de la Garde, a sailors’ church with model schooners and sloops dangling from the lavishly gilded and mosaiced arches above, and we tramped on foot over to the Palais Longchamp, where an elaborate fountain dominated a park teeming with families enjoying the sunshine. My kids frolicked there with the children of my friend Sami, who’s spending the year at the French Institute for Advanced Study, researching the dynamics of Jewish-Muslim interaction in Maghrebi popular culture.
Now and again, I saw women in sheitels and long skirts, men in black hats, and plenty of boys proudly wearing kippahs. At the pebbly local beach, we soaked in the sun and beside us a group of half-dressed youth broke into a loud and cheery rendition of “Haveinu shalom aleichem.” In the evening, I opened my ‘Kosher Near Me’ app and was in for the ultimate surprise: Shawarma City, Izzy, Yossi, Chez Jackinot, La Maronaise Café….the kosher options in France’s second city were seemingly endless. I thought of the zero kosher restaurants in Britain’s second city, where I live—and was nothing short of jealous. And hungry! How many kosher restaurants could we hit before Pesach began?
So, I was wrong after all. There are a lot of Jews in Marseille. In fact, Marseille - it turns out - has one the biggest Jewish communities in Europe, about 80,000 Jews all in. But, more significantly, here is not a city in which Jews feel a need to hide their Jewishness, afraid of Le Pen’s National Rally party or their Arab/Muslim neighbours (though I’m sure they still cheered heartily when Le Pen lost the election. I sure did!). On the contrary. From clothing stores to phone stores, it seems half the city’s shops bear mezzuzahs on their doors. I glimpsed a big Jewish star emblazoned on the awning of a boucherie minutes from Maud’s apartment; I popped in to examine the array of glatt kosher meats and discussed my seder menu plan with the friendly French butcher (though for my big pre-seders shop, I went, on recommendation, to Super-K, one of several full-scale kosher supermarkets).
On a walk with my family, we randomly passed a grand synagogue (not the one Maud had gestured at), far showier than any I could think of in Britain; we passed another lovely synagogue on our way to Cassis. I googled Marseille+synagogue. There are over 40 synagogues in Marseille!
Leaving Marseille made me sad. I loved the rich, vibrant Jewishness of the city. The alps, where we were spending the hol hamoed segment of our trip, would, I knew, be decidedly less Jewish. And so they were. But just before the sunset that would bring in the second yontev of Pesach, my husband and I were wandering through the tiny, picture-perfect, mountain-ringed town of Les Guibertes, featuring an old stone church and clock tower in its centre. There, we stumbled upon a big wooden sign nailed to a mailbox, which, alone, would have been enough for us.
It read: “Dayenou.”
