There is a well-known story about Rabbi Haim Houri, a towering figure in Tunisian Jewish lore who served as a rabbi in both Gabès, Tunisia, and Be’er Sheva, Israel. It takes place during the hiloula (anniversary of death) of Rabbi Yosef El Maarabi in El Hamma, Tunisia. A young boy, an only child of a widowed mother, falls into a deep well. Rabbi Houri is told of the tragedy and rushes to the scene. He instructs the mother to pray at the tomb while he and his students recite Psalms around the well. After an hour, waves begin to rise from the depths. The boy is lifted out and into the rabbi’s arms.
It is a story of hope, of divine mercy, of human faith. And like many stories from our heritage, it resists scrutiny. We are not asked to analyze it, only to remember it.

What do we do when the stories we’ve inherited — polished by retelling, radiant with faith — meet the unruly testimony of history? When miracle and manuscript refuse to align?

This essay is a meditation on that collision. It seeks not resolution, but honesty, the kind that allows us to carry our traditions with tenderness, even when they contradict themselves. In the shadows of burned sanctuaries and forgotten archives, we are called not to choose a single truth, but to bear the weight of many.

That burden became clear in October 2023, when rioters set fire to the El Hamma synagogue in southern Tunisia, the very place where the legend occurs. They scrawled graffiti on its walls and left behind a smoldering ruin. The building had housed the tomb of Rabbi Yosef El Maarabi, another figure shrouded in mystical tradition and local lore. Each year, Jews from across Tunisia had gathered there for his hiloula, a festival of memory, music, and prayer. In a single night, a centuries-old anchor of Jewish history was incinerated.

For years, I had seen the celebratory videos — Jews dancing, singing, and praying at El Hamma, drawn to the mystical tradition of Kabbalah tied to the tomb of Rabbi Yosef El Maarabi. The contrast between those vibrant scenes and the blackened stones after the fire was jarring. It wasn’t just the destruction of a site — it was the rupture of a story, the unsettling realization that even sacred places can vanish.

In the case of Rabbi Haim Houri, it was not only the destruction of El Hamma that unsettled me, but an encounter with another kind of rupture — a challenge not by fire, but by paper. A historical account that seemed to unravel the clarity of his legacy — one drawn not from folklore, but from the records of a modernizing movement that reshaped Jewish life across continents. This encounter with a competing truth led me to one of the most enduring challenges to traditional memory in North African Jewish life: the presence of the Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU).

We like our stories clean. We like our saints untarnished and our villains clearly marked. But history rarely offers such clarity. ”

Founded in 1860, the AIU was a France-based Jewish organization dedicated to promoting education, civil rights, and social integration for Jews across the Mediterranean, Middle East, North Africa, and parts of Eastern Europe. It established schools throughout the Jewish world, introducing secular curricula, French language instruction, and Enlightenment ideals. While it created opportunities for advancement, it also ignited tensions with rabbinic authorities who feared its impact on religious life.

In 2017, scholars Sarah Abrevaya Stein and Lia Brozgal published a translation of Ninette of Sin Street, a novella by Vitalis Danon, a former director of AIU schools in Tunisia. This work of fiction includes archival appendices. One of these is a letter titled “Mission to Gabès,” which recounts Danon’s real-life effort to open a school there.

Danon describes a tense encounter with the town’s rabbi. Though unnamed, the figure’s stature and timing clearly suggest Rabbi Haim Houri. Danon begins by painting a vivid portrait of the rabbi seated under his sukkah:

Sitting on a carpet surrounded by a mound of pillows… Never in my life have I seen such a corpulent, muscular and well-fed rabbi… His deep black eyes, sparkling, full of irony and mischief, with an insistent, indiscreet gaze that registers your every detail, turns you inside out.

The encounter comes to a head in the rabbi’s yeshiva, where a large crowd of townspeople has gathered. Danon writes that the people are eager for the school — motivated by poverty and the hope of a better future. The rabbi arrives late, and as he walks in, “everyone rises. Those fortunate enough to be in his path grope for his hand or grab the hem of his garment to kiss.”

Danon appeals to the rabbi directly, asking what could possibly justify opposing the will of the community. He responds not with vision, but grievance, lamenting his unpaid salary and personal sacrifices.

When Danon asks if the rabbi would support the school if the Alliance funded it entirely, he replies, “I will yield, but on one condition: that the Torah be given precedence over secular education. The Torah first and foremost.”

He closes the discussion with a vague concession: “I cannot give my approval, but I will not stand in your way, as long as the Torah always comes first. Peace be upon you.”

Despite this concession, the hagiographies of Rabbi Haim Houri tell a different story — that he blocked the Alliance completely, keeping Gabès untouched by modernizing forces.

Suddenly, the story shifts. The miracle worker becomes the political actor. And I am left asking: which version is true?

Maybe both.

We like our stories clean. We like our saints untarnished and our villains clearly marked. But history rarely offers such clarity. The past comes to us in fragments — oral traditions, faded documents, partisan reports. And somewhere in the collision of memory and archive, we are asked to decide not just what we believe, but what we need to believe.

Our hagiographies are more than nostalgia. They build continuity and pride, but they also smooth over complexity. When El Hamma burned, it wasn’t only a loss of physical heritage. It was a reminder that memory is vulnerable — and that even sacred stories can be both sustaining and incomplete.

So what do we do with competing truths? Do we discard the miracle because of the archive? Do we dismiss the archive because it challenges the miracle?

Perhaps the answer is to allow the dissonance. The work of memory in a post-El Hamma world is not to reconcile every contradiction but to hold them both. To teach our children that our heroes were not perfect. To let the same man be a miracle worker and a power broker. To let our stories breathe.

Another miracle story underscores this complexity. During the Nazi occupation of Tunisia, while Jews in the north were sent to labor camps, the Jews of Djerba were spared. Djerban lore tells of an Erev Shabbat when Nazis took Jewish girls hostage and demanded a ransom in gold. Even on Shabbat, the rabbis went door to door collecting what they could.

When news reached Gabès, Rabbi Haim Houri is said to have lain on the floor of his synagogue in prayer. Minutes later, the girls were released. They later recounted that as the German car left Djerba, two lions appeared and blocked the road. The miracle was attributed to Rabbi Haim Houri.

This is who he was, too.

When Rabbi Houri prayed at the well, perhaps he believed he could summon divine mercy. When he resisted the Alliance, perhaps he feared losing something precious. The past is not a courtroom. But we do have to ask: What are we choosing to carry forward?

Some say the rejection of the Alliance preserved the sacred traditions of Djerba and Gabès. Others say it kept them isolated — cut off from the waves of emancipation that transformed other Jewish communities. Like the rising water in the well, the AIU represented a tide of change.

But the fates of all these communities ultimately converged through immigration to France, Israel, and other countries. Gabès today has no Jewish population. Its tombs, synagogues, and sacred sites stand vulnerable. There is no one left to tell the stories firsthand. What remains are fragments — songs, legends, and archives — each vying to be the definitive memory. But none of them can carry the past alone. The preservation of tradition did not guarantee survival.
For educators, scholars, and Jews everywhere, the task is not to resolve these contradictions, but to hold them honestly. To teach the next generation that reverence and inquiry can coexist. To tell stories in a way that preserves their beauty without denying their complexity. And to see in every fractured tale an invitation — not just to remember, but to engage.

As educators in a post-El Hamma world, we can hold these competing stories together by curating classroom lessons that juxtapose miracle tales with archival accounts or creating memorial rituals that acknowledge both loss and complexity. It might mean encouraging students to ask not only what happened, but why the story endures — and what it demands of us now.

In the ashes of El Hamma, I find not just a memory, but a mirror. The stories are still there. But so are the questions. And in the end, that may be what binds us to our past — not certainty, but the courage to face its fractures.