The end of the Exodus from Egypt
By Amiram Barkat
Ha’aretz, Israel
April 21 2005
CAIRO – Outside it looks like a ruin, but after the guard opens the
door to admit visitors, it turns out that there once was a synagogue
here. Behind a small courtyard covered with building debris stands
a Holy Ark. Its doors are broken, and from its top dangles a Star
of David, hanging by a thread. The guard explains that the ceiling
of the building collapsed in 1992, and the pile of debris was never
cleared away.
It looks like just another Cairo synagogue that has come to a sad
end. At least 20 such synagogues have been destroyed since the 1970s,
and most of them were larger and more magnificent than the small
Maimonides synagogue in Harat al-Yahud, the medieval Jewish quarter
of Cairo. But this synagogue is not just any synagogue; it is one of
the most important Jewish sites in Egypt and in the entire world.
Last year, special events were held all over the world to mark the
800th anniversary of the death of Rabbi Moses ben Maimon, the Rambam
(Maimonides). He died in 1204 in Cairo, and according to the accepted
tradition, his bones were transferred to Tiberias for burial. But the
Jews of Egypt believe his bones never left the country. According to
Egyptian tradition, the body of Maimonides was first brought to the
small beit midrash (study hall) where he taught, and afterward was
buried at an unknown Egyptian location; one of the traditions has it
that he is buried today in the small niche in the wall of the ruined
synagogue’s study hall.
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No evidence has been found for any of these traditions, but
even historians say that the synagogue and the yeshiva named for
Maimonides is one of the oldest synagogues in the world, almost 800
years old. That is why the Jewish community in Cairo allows only rare
visits to the place. After many pleas, they agreed to open its gates
to a journalist and a photographer, on the eve of Pesach.
Although not much more remains of the synagogue itself than its
four walls, the other parts of the building are still standing. For
hundreds of years, the Jews of Egypt used to come on pilgrimages to
this place, which is located in the heart of the neighborhood’s maze
of ancient alleyways. People with incurable diseases believed that
they would be cured if they remained to sleep near Maimonides’ grave.
Today the chances are that not only would they not be cured, they
would catch another disease, judging by the stench from the toilets.
Above the entrance to the study hall, in splendid isolation, hangs
the portrait of Maimonides, who, according to a popular saying, was
the greatest Jew since Moses. In a small hall behind the entrance,
benches and other furniture float in what looks like a sewer. The
place is flooded with water, almost to the height of the ceiling. One
can view the niche of Maimonides’ “grave” today only by diving.
“What’s there, in a word, is a cesspool,” says Prof. Michael Lasker
of Bar-Ilan University, an expert on Egyptian Jewry. He says that he
tried in vain to help the president of the Cairo Jewish community,
Carmen Weinstein, find a donor to restore the place. “The large
Jewish organizations said it’s not in their area of responsibility,
and Jews of Egyptian origin have never been very cooperative,” he says.
General emptiness
The great synagogue of the Karaites in Cairo, in the Abbassieh
neighborhood, also is usually closed to visitors. The guard there
agrees to let us in on condition that we don’t take pictures. The
reason becomes clear immediately: The overall appearance of the
synagogue resembles a haunted castle in an (Egyptian) horror film.
The building is reminiscent of a huge altar standing entirely deserted,
only the sound of the wind banging on the remaining unbroken window
panes interrupts the silence. The only visitors are the flock of
pigeons that has come to live in the space, so that on the way to the
prayer hall, visitors’ shoes sink into a thick layer of guano. Two
Art Deco chandeliers made of bronze and crystal are the last vestiges
of the days of glory. Other chains remain dangling, testimony to
additional chandeliers that once hung here.
Up until just a few years ago, this synagogue, named after Moshe
Deri, was full of valuable Judaica that was brought to it in part
from other Karaite synagogues, before they were destroyed. In his
book about Jewish sites in Cairo, written in the mid-1990s, Dr. Yoram
Meital of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, an expert on the Middle
East, mentions that on the floor of the synagogue were rugs and mats
on which the Karaites prayed, that the synagogue building contained
about 2,000 books, and that in the Holy Ark there were still valuable
Torah scrolls, made of parchment. No trace of any of these exists
today. All that remains is one bookcase, a pile of crates sunk in
dust and several empty cabinets for Torah scrolls.
Meital believes local Jews were involved in the looting. Already in the
early 1990s, when he visited the place to gather material for writing a
book, he noticed that around him were “people who were very displeased
about the fact that I was documenting the items. At one stage they
forbade me to continue.” Yosef Dvir, a spokesman for the Karaites in
Israel, says they are well-aware of the fact that “the property in
Cairo was not properly maintained,” but they are unable to help. “We
barely have enough money to maintain the community in Israel,” he says.
Testimony and stories of Israelis who have visited other sites
belonging to the Cairo community paint a similar picture of neglect.
In the city’s only Ashkenazi synagogue, in the center of the city,
old books and documents are strewn on the floor in a layer of dust
and filth. The huge Jewish cemetery in the Bassatine neighborhood
serves as an improvised quarry for removing marble, stone and metals
from the graves, and hardly a single headstone remains undamaged.
In Alexandria, the situation is better. In the compound of the Jewish
community on Nebi Daniel Street stands the Synagogue of Elijah the
Prophet, the community office building where the rabbinical court sits,
and another building that served as the Jewish school and today is
leased to a Muslim educational institution. The beautiful historic
buildings are surrounding by manicured gardens and are well maintained.
The synagogue, which is considered the largest in the Middle East, is
an impressive building; a broad white marble staircase leads to the
entrance, which is surrounded by a decorative stone fence. The huge
space inside, which until the mid-20th century held 1,000 worshipers,
is illuminated by the light of dozens of seven-branched candelabra,
with the addition of sunlight that streams through the stained-glass
windows. The stone arches and pinkish Italian Carrara marble columns,
with white Greek capitals, lend the place the appearance of a
cathedral. The backs of the seats still bear pewter disks with the
names of the owners. But the overall feeling is one of emptiness,
of a bustling place that has become a museum.
The community building in Alexandria contains a huge archive that
preserves the past of the community: birth and death certificates,
addresses, and a melange of old books and documents. In one of
the locked cupboards are the cups won by the Maccabi Alexandria
basketball team, the Egyptian champion in the 1930s. Life is gradually
disappearing from here as well. On an abandoned reception desk in the
corridor the sign “civilian documents” is still posted in Hebrew and
in French, opposite is the deserted hall of the rabbinical court.
“Like lonely shadows, a few short elderly men and women wander in
the empty Jewish complex surrounding the synagogue,” wrote Israeli
author Haim Be’er 16 years ago, in an article about Alexandria, and
nothing seems to have changed except for the number of the elderly,
which has decreased. The president of the Alexandria community, dentist
Dr. Max Salame, recently celebrated his 90th birthday. Lina Mattatia,
the synagogue’s legendary tour guide, is over 80. The head of the
community, Victor Balassiano, who claims the title of “the youngest
Jew in Egypt,” is 65 years old.
The central synagogue of the Cairo community is Sha’ar Shamayim in
the city center, on Adli Street. The magnificent building, which
was completed in 1905, is decorated with symbols of the Pharaonic
lotus and the palm tree, the symbol of the Jewish community in the
city. In the 1980s, the synagogue was renovated with funds provided
by millionaire Nissim Gaon, and became revitalized for several years.
Dr. Meital still remembers hundreds of Israeli tourists who used to
attend the synagogue on festivals. Currently, no regular prayers are
held there. The facade of the building that faces the main street is
guarded by a unit of Egyptian soldiers, armed with rifles, who stand
behind protected shelters. On the other side of the road, permanent
signs condemn Israel. For years, Israel has been trying to persuade
the Egyptian government to remove the signs. The subject even came up
during the most recent talks held by Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan
Shalom last week in Cairo.
The synagogue itself is dark and deserted, with a depressing
atmosphere. In the entrance, next to a large charity box, sits an
elderly Jewish woman who has trouble being pleasant to visitors. She
doesn’t allow visits to the women’s section, and she agreed to allow us
to photograph the synagogue from inside only after we pleaded with her,
“but only one picture.”
The second Exodus
A simple memorial plaque attached to one of the columns of the
synagogue on Adli Street takes the visitor back 60 years, to the golden
age of Egypt’s Jewish community. The sign is in memory of Yusuf Aslan
Qattawi, a former Egyptian government minister and one of the authors
of the 1923 Egyptian constitution, who served as community president
from 1924-1942. The Qattawis were members of the Cairo Jewry’s moneyed
aristocracy. They made their fortune in the sugar industry, and were
among the founders of Bank Misr (the Egyptian national bank). The
bank’s board of directors at the time included other Jewish families
such as de Menasce, Rollo, Suares and Cicurel, owners of one of the
largest department store chain in the country.
In those years, 40,000 Jews lived in Cairo, with a similar number
in Alexandria. Many Jews, from Europe as well as Turkey and the
Arab countries, immigrated to Egypt at the end of the 19th century,
drawn by the economic prosperity that came with the opening of the
Suez Canal in 1896. Only a few thousand had Egyptian citizenship,
but they felt welcome in society. The Jews of Alexandria lived in
a city where one-third of the population were members of various
national minorities, and they felt no special need to learn Arabic.
The situation took a turn for the worse in the late 1930s, as
pan-Arab and Islamic sentiments spread through Egyptian society.
American scholar Joel Beinin of Stanford University mentions in one
of his articles on the subject that not only did the Jews suffer, but
so did other minority groups – the Syrian Christians, the Italians,
the Greeks and the Armenians – all of which had increasing difficulty
maintaining their cosmopolitan-Levantine identity. But the problem
that began in 1948 was unique to the Jews.
The establishment of the State of Israel and the War of Independence
heralded the beginning of the end of Egyptian Jewry. “The second
Exodus” began in 1948, and within two years, one-third of the country’s
Jews had left. The others, who had hoped that the end of the war
would bring them back into favor with the Egyptians, soon discovered
their mistake. The Egyptian government, which had outlawed Zionism,
had promised protection to the Jews who remained loyal Egyptians,
but they didn’t always keep their promise. On January 26, 1952, for
example, the police refrained from intervening in riots in Cairo,
during which dozens of Jews were murdered, and Shepheard’s Hotel,
the Metro cinema and dozens of other Jewish-owned businesses were
burned down.
Two years later, in 1954, Israel provided Egypt with an excellent
excuse for continuing with the same policy, with the exposure of a unit
of Egyptian Jews who had carried out attacks in Alexandria and Cairo
at the instructions of Israeli military intelligence, in what came
to be known in Israel as the “stinking affair.” Even avowed Egyptian
patriots, including the leaders of the Jewish community in Cairo,
began to feel unwanted. The Karaites, the “Arab Jews” of Egypt,
who for hundreds of years had dressed and spoken like Egyptians,
found themselves in the same boat as their Western brothers.
The two final blows to strike the Jews of Egypt – the Sinai Campaign
in 1956 and the Six-Day War in 1967 – left only a few hundred Jews
in the country; from one-third to one-half of Egypt’s Jews immigrated
to Israel, and the others went to Western countries – France, Canada,
Australia and, of course, the United States. The many businesses were
sold to Egyptians or nationalized. The dozens of luxurious villas
built by the wealthy Jews along the banks of the Nile and in the
center of the city today serve as embassies, upscale residences,
museums and libraries.
Torah scrolls at the airport
The communal property of the Egyptian Jews, on the other hand,
remained for the most part in Jewish hands. The synagogues, the
religious objects, the ancient books and the rare Torah scrolls were
a treasure whose value was estimated at tens of millions of dollars.
According to Egyptian law, the sale of items that are over 100 years
old is forbidden, but the underground clearance sale of the community’s
assets did not cease, and reached a peak in the 1980s.
Michael Dana, the son of Youssef Dana, who headed the community in
those years, told Ronen Bergman in this magazine (January 29, 1996)
about Jewish Judaica thieves from the United States who entered the
synagogues as tourists, antique dealers who tried to bribe the guards,
and many Israelis who turned to his father and offered him a great
deal of money for rare items. In some cases, the Egyptian authorities
caught the smugglers and confiscated their loot. Several dozen ancient
scrolls are still being held in the Cairo airport.
The Israeli ambassador to Egypt at the time, Moshe Sasson, told Bergman
that when he arrived in Cairo in 1981, there were 32 synagogues,
and when he left, six years later, only 12 remained. Several of the
community leaders did not withstand the temptation, and began to sell
assets. “They saw that there was no next generation, and that the
property would go to Egypt, so they decided to capitalize on it,”
says an Israeli Middle Eastern scholar. “They said the money would
go to the community, but in effect almost everything went into their
own pockets.”
One of the only bodies that acted to rescue the heritage of Egyptian
Jews was the Israel Academic Center in Cairo, which belongs to the
National Academy of Sciences (under whose sponsorship our visit
to Egypt took place). “We discovered huge quantities of books in
the synagogues,” says the founder of the center, and its director
during those years, Prof. Shimon Shamir. “We discovered that a large
percentage of the books came from private collections that Egyptian
Jews had thrown out for fear that `propaganda material’ in Hebrew
would be seized in their homes.”
In the early 1990s, the books, about 15,000 of them, were stored in
three libraries belonging to the Jewish community, which are located
adjacent to the Sha’ar Hashamayim synagogue on Adli Street, the Ezra
synagogue in the Fostat quarter and the Karaite synagogue. Most of
the books are from recent centuries, but among them are also three
rare religious books from the early 16th century. But the project
for collection and preservation was not completed – for budgetary
reasons, they say at the center. To date, not all the books have been
catalogued, and they are being stored in less than ideal conditions.
The present director of the center, Dr. Sariel Shalev, says that he
tried to raise about $5,000 from one of the large Jewish organizations
for the purpose of completing the catalogue, but he received no
response.
The Ezra synagogue in Fostat, the quarter from which Cairo began to
develop in the seventh century CE, is the only synagogue in Cairo that
has been fortunate. Originally, the synagogue was a Coptic church,
which was sold to the Jews in 882 CE. The synagogue was rebuilt a
number of times, the last time in 1890. During that construction work,
the Cairo Geniza was discovered in the attic, containing hundreds of
thousands of documents written by the Jews of Cairo over a period of
almost 1,000 years.
The Ezra synagogue also suffered from neglect for many years, but in
1980, in the wake of the peace agreement, it was chosen as a project
that would serve as a symbol of historical coexistence among Jews,
Christians and Muslims. The Egyptian foreign minister at the time,
Boutros Boutros-Ghali, and the president of the World Jewish Congress,
Edgar Bronfman, agreed to preserve the synagogue. The preservation
work, which was done under the supervision of Bronfman’s sister,
Canadian architect Phyllis Lambert, was concluded in the early 1990s,
and today the synagogue enjoys a large number of visitors, most of
them non-Jewish tourists.
In recent years, the Egyptians have even evacuated the residents from
the entire area, in an attempt to turn it into a tourist compound in
which the visitors can view the oldest synagogues, churches and mosques
in Cairo. Dr. Meital says that with all due respect to the preservation
work, he is disturbed by the fact that the place will never again be
a synagogue, but will remain as “a kind of interreligious monument.”
The leadership of the Weinstein women
It is hard to know how many Jews are living in Egypt today. Prof. Ada
Aharoni of Haifa, a researcher of Egyptian Jewry, who is active in
organizations of former Egyptians, estimates their number at 20: eight
in Alexandria and 12 in Cairo. However, from a legal point of view
at least, the Jewish communities in the two cities are still alive
and active, and they administer quite a few assets. The community
in Alexandria holds the compound of buildings in Nebi Daniel, the
community in Cairo has about 10 synagogues, some of them of great
historical value, as we have mentioned, the huge cemetery in Bassatine
and an office building and a school in the Abbassieh neighborhood.
The president of the community is Carmen Weinstein, a businesswoman of
about 70, who replaced her mother, Esther Weinstein, who died last year
at the age of 93. For years, the Jewish women in Cairo were mentioned
only if they married famous husbands, like the wives of Chaim Herzog
(Aura Ambache), Abba Eban (her sister, Suzy Ambache), Boutros-Ghali
(Leah Nadler) and the French prime minister Pierre Mendes-France
(Lili Cicurel). The expert on Jewish sites in Cairo, Dr. Meital,
still remembers how surprised he was when he read of Esther Weinstein’s
election to the position. “In a community that since about the year 700
has been dominated by men, that was a genuine feminist revolution. I
remember that in Alexandria they didn’t know what to make of it.”
The bulletin board in the entrance to the synagogue in Adli Street
is covered with the pictures of the Weinstein women, mother and
daughter, together with Hillary and Chelsea Clinton, who visited the
community in 1999. Some former Egyptian Jews accuse Carmen Weinstein
of serving the interests of Egypt rather than those of the Jewish
community. Her supporters say that she works tirelessly to protect
the assets that remain in the community’s hands. Prof. Shamir says
that Carmen made “supreme efforts” to prevent the destruction of the
Jewish cemetery in Bassatine, when the Egyptian authorities wanted to
pave an expressway over it. She also built a wall round the cemetery
and managed to remove the squatters who had come to live there.
(Weinstein refused to meet with us. One of her associates explained
that she doesn’t meet with Israeli journalists, and doesn’t conduct
business relations with Israeli groups).
But Weinstein’s efforts on the Egyptian front seem to pale when
compared to her struggles with her fellow Jews. Her acquaintances
say that she is angry at the Israelis living in Cairo, because they
stay away from the community’s synagogues. In recent years, she has
repeatedly turned to wealthy former Egyptians who live in the West,
in attempts to raise money to restore the Jewish sites, but without
success. “It was quite embarrassing,” says Prof. Shamir, who has
helped her on a number of occasions. “They said they didn’t want to
hear about Egypt, that for them it’s a closed file. I have no doubt
that Egyptian Jewry could do much more to preserve its past.”
About 20 organizations of former Egyptian Jews are active today in
the world, and many of them have been at odds with one another for
years. In recent years, after decades of indifference and neglect,
there has been an awakening. Next year, the first World Congress
of Jews from Egypt will be held in Haifa. Prof. Aharoni, one of
the initiators of the congress, says that the idea is to “unite
forces” in an attempt to preserve the Jewish heritage in Egypt. The
initiative that is taking shape, she says, is to transfer the books
and the papers of the Jewish communities to a special wing of the new
library in Alexandria. “We have received very positive responses to
the proposal from the Egyptian authorities,” she says.
However, the idea arouses determined opposition in the Historical
Society of Jews from Egypt, a group that was founded in 1996 in the
United States. Since its establishment, the organization has been
conducting a campaign to remove all the communal property from Egypt,
not only sacred books and religious objects, but the community archives
in Cairo and Alexandria as well. “For us these aren’t archives,
they’re living documents,” explains the organization’s president,
Desire Sakkal. “People want their birth certificates, their ketubot
[Jewish marriage contracts].”
The heads of the organization have already managed to have articles
on the subject appear in the American press, to sign on members
of Congress, and to turn to President George W. Bush. In 2001,
the State Department announced that a comprehensive study on the
subject found no reason to intervene at this stage, since Weinstein,
the community president, is opposed to taking the items out of the
community’s hands. Sakkal refuses to give up. Recently, he says,
he received a letter “from a very high-ranking Israeli official”
expressing his willingness to help.
Prof. Shamir is not enthusiastic about Sakkal’s plans. Underlying
the demands to take the items out of Egypt, he believes, are often
“shady motives.” Prof. Aharoni agrees: “With all due respect to
Sakkal’s activity, many former Egyptians throughout the world think
that he is too extreme, that this activity is damaging and that it
is simply unrealistic.”
Sakkal’s organization has already announced that it will not
participate in the upcoming congress, after his demands to take a
belligerent line against Egypt were rejected. In an interview with
him, Sakal levels sharp criticism at the congress, and calls it
“the best attorney that Egypt could have found. If they want to do
belly dances with the Egyptians and to eat ful and falafel with them,
let them live and be well. We aren’t interested.”