Cheikh Mwijo

Cheikh Mwijo was born in 1937 in Meknes

Moshe Attias was born in Meknes, Morocco. His father, Yaakov Attias, was a musician and percussionist who played in the orchestra of Ben Haroush. As a child he learned music by listening to his father's band and played and sang with local orchestras.

In Morocco he made embroidery for army uniforms. He moved to Israel in 1962, lived for a time in a transit camp and settled in Kiryat Haim. Without work in his old trade, he studied with the musician David Ben Haroush and turned to music.

He first played the mandolin and later the violin. He wrote about 40 songs for Salim Al Maghribi and recorded his first record in 1969 with Jackie Azoulay. He performed often at weddings and events of the Moroccan Jewish community, and in the 1970s he also performed abroad, mainly in France.

His songs dealt with Moroccan holy men and with daily life, mostly in Moroccan Arabic. His song Ibrahim Al-Khalil spoke of Abraham as a shared ancestor of Jews and Muslims. He lived in Kiryat Ata, had a stroke a few months before his death, and died in 2020.