Tunisia appoints first Jewish Cabinet minister in decades
Rene Trabelsi named as tourism minister in bid to lift industry hit by terrorist attacks
Tunisia yesterday approved a Cabinet reshuffle that included the appointment of Jewish businessman Rene Trabelsi as Minister of Tourism.
Mr Trabelsi is the third member of the country’s small minority of 2,000 Jews to join Tunisia’s Cabinet since independence from France in 1956.
Albert Bessis served in the 1955 government that led the break with France, while Andre Barouch was a close aide to former president Habib Bourguiba in 1956.
The addition of 10 new ministers was proposed by Prime Minister Youssef Chahed last week at a time of political and economic crisis.
Mr Trabelsi is from the island of Djerba, the heartland of Tunisia’s Jewish community and a site of pilgrimage.
The island is recovering from a 2002 terrorist attack on the famous Ghriba synagogue that killed 21 people, including 14 German tourists.
Mr Trabelsi’s father, Perez Trabelsi, is the president of the synagogue and has been the leader of the community since 1985. He had a vital role in organising pilgrimages and is known for promoting Jewish-Muslim coexistence.
Tunisia is home to one of North Africa’s largest Jewish communities. Jews have lived in the country since the days of the Roman Empire and their community once numbered 100,000.
But fear and poverty led to waves of emigration after the creation of Israel in 1948. Many Jews left the country after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, with most going to France or Israel.
Mr Trabelsi studied management in France and set up a travel agency in the 1990s, which now caters to almost 300,000 travellers a year, mostly from France to Tunisia.
But terrorist attacks have had an impact on the country’s tourism industry. In 2015, extremists attacked the Bardo National Museum in Tunis killing 22 people and wounding about 50. The museum was one of the Tunisian capital’s main tourist attractions.
Three months later there was another attack, this time on a beach resort in Sousse where a gunman killed 37 tourists, mostly British, and a Tunisian guard.
But Mr Chahed said on Monday that he expected tourist visits to reach nine million for the first time next year. About 6.2 million tourists visited Tunisia in the first nine months of this year, up 16.9 per cent from the same period last year.