Mark Lavie
Two elderly ladies dressed in black, one behind large, dark sunglasses, sat quietly in the front row of chairs set up in the courtyard of Cairo’s downtown synagogue.
The coffin of Carmen Weinstein, their leader for the last nine years, the force behind the tiny Jewish community of Cairo, had just been carried past them on its way to burial at the cemetery she had worked so hard to preserve.
The two old ladies, part of the community and symbols of its demise, appeared to realize what this meant. They spoke to no one, not even to each other. What could they say?
Their new leader had the courage to express what most people do not want to think about – more than 2,000 years of continuous Jewish life in Egypt is coming to an end. Magda Haroun herself is “only” 60, one of the youngest of the 40 or so remaining Jews of Egypt. No Egyptian Jewish men attended the funeral. There may not be any left in Cairo. Likewise, no children.
Where Carmen Weinstein’s quest was to preserve Jewish life in Egypt dating back to the Bible, Magda Haroun stated a different goal.
“I promise to take care of you until God receives us,” she told the two old ladies and the rest of the 200 people, almost all of them non-Jewish guests, seated in the courtyard, as she starkly acknowledged the dim future of this “unfortunately dying community.”
The battle is over what will be left behind.
Carmen Weinstein, who died in her Cairo home at age 82 on April 13, 2013, was a fighter. She fought Egyptian governments to restore ancient synagogues and won. She fought for restoration of the ninth-century Bassatine Cemetery south of downtown and won that fight, too, until Egypt defeated her. Now the cemetery is overrun by seeping sewage, garbage and squatters.
Her mother is buried there, but years ago she stopped trying to take care of the grave…
Egypt overwhelmed her and her community and her cemetery. Most recently the population explosion, collapse of the economy and absence of effective government undermined her quest to preserve the place where Jews have been buried for 1,300 years.
But not even the cruellest of Egypt’s often ruthless rulers over the last 20 centuries managed to defeat the Jews of Egypt the way that one modern leader did.
Gamal Abdel Nasser drove Egypt’s Jews into exile in the 1950s. Part of the context was the creation of the State of Israel and Egypt’s wars – its humiliating defeat at the hands of the new and poor Jewish state in 1949 and Israel’s participation in the ill-conceived French and British attack aimed at restoring the Suez Canal to foreign control in 1956.
In a whirl of nationalist xenophobia, Nasser responded by expelling foreigners from Egypt. British, French, others – and 65,000 Jews. The difference was the Jews were Egyptians. They were there before Islam was born, long before modern Egypt was created.
Today there are Egyptians who mark the start of the slow but steady deterioration of their nation with Nasser’s expulsion of the Jews. For 20 centuries, leaders of all persuasions had incorporated Jews into their governments and economies, and they benefited. Nasser threw them out, and the cosmopolitan, quasi-European cultural element of a crucial part of Egyptian society exited with them…
A few hundred, perhaps a few thousand, managed to stay behind despite Nasser, but not enough to form a critical mass. The yeshiva named for its teacher, the great twelfth-century Jewish scholar Moses Maimonides, the Rambam, deteriorated into a roofless ruin. The Ben Ezra synagogue, home of the unique Geniza repository, with its documents describing Jewish life in Egypt for more than 1,000 years, suffered from neglect.
And the cemetery, already in use for 300 years when Maimonides moved to Cairo from his native Spain, began to disappear under the weight of slums, thieves and unregulated urban sprawl.
Carmen Weinstein set out on a rearguard, last-ditch campaign to preserve Jewish heritage in Egypt. Though she never admitted it, the abrasive, aggressive yet cultured leader must have known that her quest was only to guard the physical remnants of a Jewish life that was slowly disappearing.
She had the synagogues and cemetery restored. She battled organizations of Egyptian Jews in the United States and France who wanted to “rescue” the sacred books and ornaments of the Egyptian Jewish community by taking them out of there. She adamantly refused.
Magda Haroun promised to carry on that battle, while admitting that it’s a fight over things, not over life itself…
The message was clear to the two old ladies in the front row. It was clear to everyone.
It’s over.
Excerpted from the e-book Broken Spring based on Mark Lavie’s two years in Cairo as a foreign correspondent.