A Moroccan Synagogue

I had wanted to go to a Moroccan Synagogue for a while, so when my friend told me she was going, I jumped at the opportunity. First a little bit about my friend, Kim. Her grandparents on her mother's side are from Iraq but had immigrated to Israel. Her mother spent most of her time in Israel, however, her dad is American Jewish and Kim spent most of her time in the US (except for a year of high school in Israel). She is Sephardic Jewish, and pretty conservative... the whole time she's been here she's been eating vegetarian so that she stays kosher (even though all meat here is hilal so they're killed in a kosher way if not blessed in a kosher way...). She actually managed to get her boyfriend to come to Morocco too on the SIT program (which is also at the same center we're studying at). So we head to the synagogue on Friday night and arrive at the unmarked, big building. We start to head inside and a guy (the [I assume] Muslim building's keeper) comes up to us asking if we're Israeli. Kim is so she said yes, and he took us up to a door and tells Kim's boyfriend to go in, he says for us to go in another door. We go in to a pretty large prayer room that has lace curtains between us and the main prayer room. There are no other women there, but the men are already in the middle of prayer. The room is beautiful, with big chandlers, pictures of old Jewish men on the walls, gilded Hebrew everywhere. I look at the prayer books and they're all in just Hebrew, with a few french sentences here and there (unlike the ones in the US that have translations). Kim finds the place that we are in the prayer book and she reads along. It was interesting, being separated from the main group, trying to see in at the mostly over 60 group of men, some wearing yamacas, some just wearing hats, who said most of the prayer and sang some songs and then, when the Sabbath prayers were over, left. No sermon, they didn't even take out the Torah, it was just prayers. It was very different than my other experiences of synagogues, but Kim said it wasn't that different than her experiences in Israel.
It's a strange relationship that Moroccans have with Jews. There are many famous Jewish Moroccans, including one of the counselors to the king. My host dad even talks about how good the Jews have been at preserving Moroccan music. In the village we went to in the desert, the Berbers had learned their silver making from the Jews who had chosen to leave. In fact, most of the time you hear a certain nostalgia for the Moroccan Jews who left. The ones who stayed seem to be a pretty old population, the majority of which are in Casablanca. However, many Israeli Moroccan Jews return for pilgrimages to the shrines of Jewish saints... in fact there's one next weekend.