Img. ID: 195309

Rachel Sis was the daughter of R. Jacob Katorza from Sus in Southern Tunisia. Following a revelation of a woman-saint known as Al-Gtar, she established in the 1920s a pilgrimage site near Gafsa to venerate the saint (for the story about the saint, see: Reader's desk, Ai-Gtar Synagogue; see also: Shabtay, BiZkhut, 1999, p. 13-14; Pérez-Cohen, L'écho, 2007, pp. 197-230). In the 1950s this site was relocated to Ramla by Polet Bokobza, the adopted daughter of Rachel Sis. During the years and due to the revelation she experienced, people attributed Sis some of the miraculous abilities of the saint. When the Al-Gtar Synagogue was established in Ramla, Rachel's Torah case was transferred to the synagogue and was endowed with sacred and miraculous qualities. A dispute between the founder and the family who keeps the synagogue led to the transfer of the pilgrimage site to another site, and the sacred Torah scroll with its case was not found. However, our documentation indicates that it was transferred to a third location.