Monday, April 25, 2005

EGYPTIAN JUDAISM is the subject of an article ("Judaism in Egypt - The End of the Exodus from Egypt") in Egypt Election Daily News. Evidently it is reprinted from Ha'aretz, but I seem to have missed it when it came out. It describes some of the ancient synagogues in Egypt, including the Maimonides Synagogue, the Karaite Synagogue, and the Ben Ezra Synagogue (which housed the famous Cairo Geniza), all three in Cairo. Of the last it says:
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."


Most of the others are in disrepair, some direly so, after the exodus of nearly all Egyptian Jews in the twentieth century. Many Jewish books have also been lost in this process.

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