In CAIRO, there is an area called the ‘Jews’ Quarter, but no Jews live there. The Ben Maimon synagogue exemplifies Egypt’s relationship with its Jewish past. The ancient synagogue still stands, but its roof is gone. Egyptian workers are busy lugging planks across what was once the Ben Maimon synagogue’s sanctuary and pumping out greenish water flooding the dirt floor of an adjacent room. The bimah, the lectern where the Torah scroll was once read, was visible under plastic sheeting, and a niche in the wall facing toward Jerusalem was all that remained of the elaborate wooden ark that held the scrolls.
“Jewish sites are an important part of our heritage, and we place as much importance on the maintenance and development of the Jewish temples as we do to the mosques and the churches in Egypt,” stated Zahi Hawass, Egypt’s chief archeologist and the official responsible for fixing up the synagogue. Egypt’s Jewish community, which dates back millennia and in the 1940s numbered around 80,000, is down to several dozen, almost all of them elderly. The rest were driven out decades ago by mob violence and state-sponsored persecution tied in large part to the Israeli-Arab conflict, a story repeated across the Arab world.
The Jewish community that once flourished in the Arab world’s most populous nation left behind physical traces ranging from grand temples in central Cairo and Alexandria to a holy man’s humble grave in a Nile Delta village. But the modern-day Egyptian view of those relics lies within a narrow spectrum ranging from disinterest to outright hostility.
Jewish sites exist in the Mediterranean city of Alexandria, home to a grand synagogue, and in the Nile Delta village of Nekraha, where Jewish worshippers make a yearly pilgrimage to the grave of Abu Hatzira, a 19th-century rabbi and healer. Most sites are in the capital; and more than monuments to the Jews, they are reminders of a more cosmopolitan Middle East, when Cairo and other Arab cities housed a jumble of ethnic minorities in the midst of Muslim majorities.
The best-known synagogue still standing is Ben Ezra, located among Christian churches and souvenir stores. The synagogue, with its marble pillars and ceiling painted in muted greens and reds, is believed to date to 882 AD. The thousands of documents the Jews stored there over the centuries were discovered in the late 1800s and became famous as the Cairo Genizah, one of the most valuable troves of historical documents ever found.
Today the house of prayer is open as a tourist site. A man stands in front of a dusty glass case at the back, offering yarmulkes and postcards for sale. On a downtown Cairo street stands the monumental synagogue known as Shaar Hashamayim, the “gate of heaven,” a structure of grey stone with an interior of carpets and gold-painted walls. Sidewalk barricades and a dozen armed policemen give it the appearance of a besieged fortress.
In the 1940s, upper-class Jews would fill its pews on the Sabbath. On a recent Sabbath it was empty except for a Muslim caretaker. Nadia Haroun Silvera, 55, a lawyer and one of Egypt’s last Jews, remembers her grandmother leading her in as a child. She said no guards were needed then. “They should take care of all the Jewish synagogues. It’s a part of Egyptian history,” she said.
