Rabat – Morocco’s Royal Basketball Federation and the Israeli basketball association (IBBA) announced on January 22 that they will be signing a cooperation agreement in Morocco in March.
Representatives from the Moroccan and the Israeli basketball association held online meetings to prepare for the March agreement, according to Israeli media.
Extending to educational, social, and medical basketball-related fields, the cooperation will also pave the way for the organization of friendly games between men and women basketball teams.
The agreement, the first of its kind between the Israeli basketball federation and that of an Arab country, comes one
years after the two countries announced resuming diplomatic ties.
Morocco was historically home to a large Jewish community. In December 2021, the North African kingdom became the first and only Arab country allocating state funds to reviving its Jewish heritage through archeological expeditions and academic research.
Read Also: Morocco Orders Restoration of Historical Jewish sites
The renovation process extended to hundreds of synagogues, Jewish cemeteries, including Morocco’s largest Jewish cemetery in Fes that holds 1,300 graves, reported Israeli media in December. Morocco also reinstated the Jewish name of multiple neighborhoods.
Also late last year, an excavation expedition with archeologists from Morocco, France, and Israel unearthed the ruins of a synagogue in the Atlas Mountains.
Ritual scripts and artifacts found on the site suggest and consolidate claims that the town was home to a Jewish community between the 16th and 19th centuries.
Located not far from the archeological site, a town near Ifrane was also home to one of the most ancient Jewish communities in North Africa, according to historians.
Read Also: Significant Ruins of Early Jewish Community Found in Morocco
