Who will preserve Egypt's Jewish heritage?

This interesting in-depth feature in Egypt today, 'Second Exodus' by Sarah Mishkin, profiles those inside the country and out who are working to preserve Egypt's Jewish heritage, now that there are fewer than 100 Jews left. (With thanks: Roger)

"Diplomats choose their words carefully, and US Ambassador to Egypt Francis J. Ricciardone is no exception. Ricciardone delivered short remarks in late October at a celebration Weinstein organized for the centennial of Shaar Hashamayim, the synagogue on Adly Street still used occasionally for religious celebrations.

“This is a symbol of something beautiful and something that Egyptians hold dear,” the Ambassador said. “I congratulate the small but proud community of Egyptians who are Jewish.”

That contortion — “Egyptians who are Jewish” — sums up the main problem facing those, Jewish and otherwise, working to preserve Cairo’s Jewish sites: convincing Egyptians to see the story of Egypt’s Jews as part of the story of Egypt.

“This synagogue was built as an integral part of the local history and culture,” says Professor Yoram Meital of Israel’s Ben Gurion University, speaking at Shaar Hashamayim’s centennial. Meital, who specializes in modern Egyptian history, points to marble panels at the front of the synagogue, inscribed with the names of the congregation’s members. “Think about the names that were so instrumental to the Egyptian economy of the beginning of the twentieth century!”

"Some Egyptians, he says, are beginning to write about Egypt’s Jewish heritage, including a book from top publishing house Dar Al-Shorouk entitled Al-Yahud fi Misr (The Jews in Egypt, 1993) by writer Kasim Abdul Kasim and a 2007 Arabic translation of Beinin’s book on Jewish emigration, also from Dar Al-Shorouk. Although much of what is published about Judaism is anti-Semitic — reprints of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, for example — Meital says that every two or three years a new book of serious scholarship is published.

Muslim-Jewish relations in Egypt deteriorated as a result of the 1948 war, but the period before the war was a sort of golden age of cohabitation. Maimonides, Meital points out, whose synagogue and school are most in need of conservation, is himself a symbol of positive interfaith relations: He served as an advisor to medieval Muslim leaders, and his work on classical Greek philosophy would heavily influence Christian philosophers in the centuries to come.

“I would be among the people who would ask the Egyptian society in general to see this synagogue as part of their identity, their general, broader identity as Egyptians and not, of course, to exclude these Jewish institutions and [push] the whole of this issue into the arms of the Arab-Israeli conflict,” Meital says.

Jews as prominent as Rene Qattawi, a community leader during the Second World War, opposed Zionism, a philosophy led mostly by European Jews. According to Beinin’s documentation, Qattawi encouraged Jewish war refugees to come to Egypt rather than overburden Mandate Palestine. But acts of espionage and sabotage by a handful of Egyptian Jews against Egypt in the early 1950s — known as Operation Susannah — tainted the perception of Jewish loyalty to the Egyptian nation.

Some of those Jews who left Egypt ended up in Israel, and Cairo’s Israeli Academic Center contributes some funds for the upkeep of libraries in a few synagogues, including Shaar Hashamayim. But the ties today stop there. Members of the local community are quick to point out that ‘Jewish’ and ‘Israeli,’ or ‘Jewish’ and ‘Zionist’ are not synonyms. (Magda) Haroun, for one, has never been to Israel, in deference to her father’s strongly anti-Zionist views.

“I’m independent in my things; she’s independent in her things,” says Professor Gabriel Rosenbaum, director of Cairo’s Israeli Academic Center, about(Carmen) Weinstein’s leadership of the Jewish Community of Cairo. “She doesn’t ask what we think.”

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