Thousands of Jews have ended their annual pilgrimage to Africa's oldest synagogue on the Tunisian island of Djerba. Around 1,000 Tunisian Jews joined 5,000 others from around the globe during the two-day festival at the Ghriba shrine. "It's even better than last year," event organiser Perez Trabelsi, the president of the Jewish community in Djerba, told the news agency AFP.
Tunisian authorities had imposed strict security measures to prevent an attack similar to the one carried out by a suicide bomber at the site in 2002 that killed 21 people. The Jewish community in Tunisia is still one of the largest in the Arab world, although numbers dropped from 100,000 on independence from France in 1956 to around 1,500 today. Most emigrated to France or Israel.Nearly half of those who remain live in Djerba.
The April 2002 attack, just before the pilgrimage, saw a suicide bomber ram the wall of the synagogue with a lorry laden with natural gas, which blew up killing 14 German tourists, five Tunisians and two French visitors.
