The Casablanca Children's Soup Kitchen (La Soupe Populaire pour Enfants; SP) was a children's soup kitchen in the Mellah (Jewish quarter) of Casablanca, Morocco. Founded in 1941 by local architect Elias Suraqui, the organization operated until 1964. The institution was financed and supported from the year 1948 by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JOINT or JDC), the Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU), l'Œuvre de secours aux enfants (OSE), and private donors as well.
During its years of operation, approximately 6,000 children were supported and educated within the SP's framework. The staff consisted of a director and a dozen teachers, cooks, nurses and part-time or full-time educators.
Context
In 1941, with 40,000 inhabitants, the Mellah of Casablanca was the most populated in Morocco. Poverty was deep; families lived huddled together in a single room, with children in rags and often without shoes. Chronic malnutrition and epidemics were rampant especially among children who suffered from ringworm, trachoma and tuberculosis due to crowded living conditions. The French authorities under the Vichy rule were not inclined to finance a partial transfer of this Jewish population to salubrious dwellings in the European neighborhood. Even after the war, they focused primarily on the construction of cheap housing in the European city with the aim of accommodating Moroccan workers from the countryside, whom the city badly needed for its development. As for Jewish organizations, until 1945, they concentrated their efforts on Holocaust survivors. It was only in the late 1940s that they started addressing the issue. From 1940 to 1960 internal immigration to Morocco occurred. The Jewish population in the countryside moved to large cities, mainly Casablanca, thus contributing to an increase in the urban population. In 1960, the census of the Jewish population in Morocco was as follows:
The Casablanca agglomeration comprised about 45% of the Jewish population among them 40,000 Jews living in the Mellah.
The Hedarim (Children's Study Classes)
In 1941, the only structures in the Mellah that dealt with children were the hedarim, also known as Cheder. These were closed rooms, with no ventilation, no furniture, often without windows. The young children (usually boys) were huddled together under the guidance of an adult instructor who taught them the Hebrew alphabet and prayers. Every Mellah in Morocco (or elsewhere) has his Cheder, even in the most remote corners of the Atlas Mountains where the Jewish communities had none or very few contact with the outside. The hedarim existence is a Jewish specificity that has endured throughout history. This singularity meant that for centuries, illiteracy, at least as far as men were concerned, did not exist among the Jews. From the end of the 1940s, Jewish organizations, led by the JOINT, fought hard against the hedarim institution, as the hedarim contributed to the spread of contagious diseases that ravaged the Mellah. In 1948, an internal Joint report stated, “The eventual plan is to remove about 2,000 children from the Hedarim of the Mellah and to give them decent nursery care during the day” The JOINT thus supported alternative structures (Talmud Torah, Lubawitch, SP and others) which would be able to compete with the hedarim. In 1952, the JOINT expressly asked these organizations to integrate children from the hedarim as an absolute priority. This policy finally paid off. At the end of 1952, there were no more hedarim in the Mellah of Casablanca.