World

Amid Security Threats, Tunis' Only Kosher Restaurant Shutters

By Steve Inskeep

Published November 4, 2015 at 4:09 AM CST

Jacob LaLoush poses beside bougainvillea flowers outside his kosher restaurant in Sidi Bou Said, outside Tunis, in 2012. He says his is the only kosher restaurant left in all of Tunis.

A kosher restaurant in Tunisia is closing.

It's the last kosher restaurant in the country's capital. The Jewish-run restaurant is shutting down because of terrorist threats.

It's one of many aftershocks in the country where the Arab Spring began.

A few years ago, I visited that kosher restaurant — a vestige of Tunisia's ancient and once-thriving Jewish community. We were traveling across North Africa, and we took a table with the owner, Jacob LaLoush.

We'd heard his restaurant served a vodkalike concoction made from figs called bukha — a type of Tunisian vodka. When we dropped by in 2012, he taught us how to drink it, retrieving a frost-covered, small green bottle from the freezer in his kitchen.

Do you drink all in one shot or do you sip it? I asked.

"L'chaim!" he said, using the Hebrew toast "to life!" "You test first and after, you [drink] in one shot."

LaLoush's mother, Lily, and chef Hadia Ben Mahmoud prepare dinner in the family restaurant, Mamy Lily, during our visit in 2012.

Bukha, he explained, "was the basic drink in all the Jewish feasts." And non-Jews had come to drink what's become known as a distinctive Tunisian national product.

To LaLoush, alcohol symbolized freedom in a majority-Muslim country, but it was also becoming a source of friction in Tunisia. He celebrated that freedom even though, because of medication, he couldn't drink.

That was three years ago.

Now, his restaurant is closing. He told us by phone this week that authorities informed him of a possible attack.

"I'm obliged to close my restaurant because it's a security obligation for my clients, my mother and me," LaLoush said.

His country has become more restive since the Arab Spring. Islamist movements have emerged — some peaceful, some less so.

Yet LaLoush remained cheerful on the phone.

"I have big hope for Tunisia and I want to stay here," he said. "I want to continue my action in the cultural life of my country."

He plans to open a new restaurant in a different neighborhood, and he says he will preserve the kosher menu — and through it, a slice of Jewish culture.

But, for security, the new restaurant will serve customers by invitation-only.