Upon discovering from a family member that her great-grandfather was born in Manchester, speaker Raquel Levy-Toledano undertook an immediate quest to uncover his origins. Did he belong to an Ashkenazi family that migrated to England from Prussia at the start of the 19th century? This hypothesis could elucidate certain Ashkenazi customs observed within her family. Alternatively, could he have been born in England by chance? This second possibility is plausible given that her family hails from Mogador (now Essaouira), a city with strong trade connections to England throughout the 19th century.

This marked the start of a long and arduous but enlightening journey for Raquel. Through both traditional document-based genealogy and genetic testing, she uncovers a new branch of her family, the Levy Belfsahi. Her research journey took her from Mogador in Morocco, to Manchester in England, Faro in Portugal, Ponta Delgada in the Azores, and finally to San Anton and Praia in Cape Verde. Along the way, she embarked many distant relatives now residing in various countries including Morocco, France, Israel, Canada, the United States, Switzerland, Portugal, England, and Cape Verde.

Raquel’s genealogical journey highlights the urgent need for more systematically organized research on Moroccan Jewish genealogy. While some rabbinic lineages are well-documented, information on other families remains either inaccessible or entirely absent. In numerous cases, oral tradition is still the primary -- sometimes only -- source of knowledge. To address this gap, she created the Jewish Moroccan Genealogy group on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/groups/genealogiedesjuifsdumaroc) aimed at reconnecting families and reconstructing a unified Moroccan Jewish family tree. Today, this tree includes over 400,000 interconnected profiles of Moroccan and Algerian Jews.

About the Speaker
Raquel Levy-Toledano was born in Morocco, then moved to France where she received her MD in gynecology and PhD in molecular endocrinology, followed by postdoctoral training at the NIH in Maryland. She is a board member of IAJGS, a board member of the Cercle de Généalogie Juive where she manages the Genetic Genealogy Group, a member of the General Assembly of the International Institute for Jewish Genealogy in Israel, president of NAJMA (Nos Ancêstres Juifs Marocains et Algériens) Genealogical Society, an expert curator of Geni’s Moroccan and Algerian Jewish family tree, co-administrator of the Avotaynu DNA project section involving North African Jews and founder of the Généalogie des Juifs Marocains Facebook Group, which has 13,000 members. She has published several articles in Généalo-J and other journals and has presented at numerous conferences and Zoom meetings.