Julia Schulte-Werning Lectures on Tuberculosis, Jewish Organizations, and the State in Decolonizing Morocco

Julia Schulte-Werning, the recipient of the 2023 Bernard and Mollie Steuer/JDC Archives Fellowship, gave her public lecture on “A Sanatorium for the Future: Tuberculosis, Jewish Organizations, and the State in Decolonizing Morocco.”

Schulte-Werning explored how in the late 1940s and 1950s, Jewish public health experts, physicians, and social workers sought to tackle the infectious disease tuberculosis among impoverished Jews in Morocco, which at the time was still part of French North Africa before its independence in 1956. Their efforts were part of a broader medical aid program launched by the Jewish humanitarian organizations JDC and OSE shortly after World War II. In the 1950s, a new sanatorium dedicated to Jewish patients was built in Ben Ahmed, southeast of Casablanca. Started as a local initiative during World War II, the Ben Ahmed Sanatorium project developed into a joint undertaking by the JDC, community committees, and the colonial administration. Drawing on records from the JDC Archives, the lecture examines the sanatorium plans in the context of the JDC-OSE health care program for Moroccan Jews.