El Ghriba's pilgrimage survived a bombing that specifically targeted it, and the procession that marks its main festival still carries an object through the streets each year regardless.
The 2002 attack
On 11 April 2002, a truck bomb detonated outside the synagogue during the pilgrimage season, killing twenty-one people, most of them German tourists, in an attack later linked to al-Qaeda. The synagogue was repaired and pilgrimage resumed in subsequent years under substantially increased security, an arrangement that has continued given the community's small size and the site's history as a target.
A candelabra carried through Djerba
The synagogue's annual Lag BaOmer pilgrimage traditionally includes a procession carrying a decorated candelabra, or menara, through the streets, drawing Jewish visitors from Tunisia's diaspora and abroad back to an island whose resident Jewish population has shrunk drastically over the past century through emigration, mainly to Israel and France.
A very old claim, loosely anchored
Tradition holds the site has hosted a synagogue since shortly after the destruction of the First Temple, with a door or stone said to have been brought from Jerusalem itself, an origin claim treated as devotionally significant within the community even though it cannot be independently verified against the building's actual, much later archaeological fabric.