Reclaiming History

PHOTOS COURTESY OF NANCY BERMAN

STACY GITTLEMAN CONTRIBUTING WRITER

When Nancy Berman of Huntington Woods travels, she puts visiting Jewish historical sites on her itinerary. On a 2018 trip to Spain, she was hard pressed, however, to find any historical markers of Spanish Jewry. There was no mention or physical reminder of the persecution of Jews during the Inquisition. Nothing to mark the expulsion of all the country’s Jews in 1492.

“It saddened me that there was not a single memorial or plaque that gave any indication that a Jewish community in Spain once existed,” said Berman, 47, who has spent decades in Jewish Detroit leadership roles, most notably being past president for Yad Ezra. “When I returned home, I thought there must be something I can do to get involved to change this. But I was told I would need to have connections in the government, which I did not, so I felt in some ways I hit a dead end.”

Though her efforts to preserve the presence of Jewish history in Spain have yet to be fulfilled, her tenacity did lead her in 2019 to connect with Joseph Douek, a New York City businessman and philanthropist of Egyptian Jewish descent who, in May 2020, was appointed by the Trump Administration as commissioner of the United States Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad.

Now, Berman is working with Douek and the remaining two Jews in Egypt to raise more than $1 million to preserve and restore the Jewish cemeteries of Cairo.

On Oct. 18-21, Berman traveled to Egypt with Douek to meet with high-level government officials there and to see the cemeteries for herself, and document them with photographs and video for her fundraising efforts. She also met with Jonathan Cohen, U.S. Ambassador to Egypt, toured Cairo, met other Egyptians and explored ancient Jewish sites in Alexandria where the Egyptian government had restored an ancient synagogue.

“My trip to Egypt was like walking through Jewish history,” Berman said. “There is a high educational value in learning about Jewish communities that once flourished and existed, such as the ones in Egypt and Spain. Many of the older people I met remembered the times when there was Jewish life in Egypt. They are heartbroken that all that are left of their Jewish friends and neighbors are the beautiful synagogues and cemeteries.

“There are things we can do as individuals to make an impact to preserve Jewish history so future generations can come one day and learn and see for themselves about the Jewish community that was once there.”

Berman said much could be learned from wandering the Jewish burial grounds — there are three in Cairo — and learning about the prominent Jews interred there. The world’s second oldest Jewish cemetery, only to the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem, the Bassatine cemetery of Cairo was established in the late ninth century by the Sultan Ahmed ibn Touloun. At the time, it was located on a remote desert 50 miles east of the city and spanned 145 acres. Visitors still come to visit the grave

of the 15th-century Torah scholar Rabbi Kapusi and the tomb of the Mosseri family, a prominent clan that came to Egypt from Italy in the 1700s. Its members founded the country’s Zionist Organization chapter in 1917 and financed the building of Jerusalem’s King David Hotel.

Through time, Cairo’s footprint and population rapidly ballooned. In 1950, the city had 2 million people, compared to its present-day population of 21 million. In the 1930s and 1940s, the years leading up to the creation of the modern State of Israel, the Jewish community in Cairo was 80,000 strong and Jews were involved in every part of Egyptian culture and society. But, after 1948, most of Egypt’s Jews left or were driven out. Cairo’s neighborhoods expanded around and even encroached into the land of the Jewish cemeteries with roads and makeshift buildings. The marble gravestones of Jewish graves were looted, and the cemeteries became dumping grounds for Cairo’s garbage and sewerage.

Of the hundreds of acres that were once the cemetery, only 38 acres remain. And there are just two Jews left in all of Egypt to look after and care for the Bassatine, Fostat and Karaite cemeteries.

There have been past efforts of diplomacy and work to restore and preserve the burial grounds dating back to the 1970s. But rapid progress took hold when Douek in February 2019 was invited as part of a delegation of two dozen American Jewish leaders to visit Egypt and have a meeting with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.

Douek can trace his family roots back many generations in Egypt. His great-uncle was the last chief rabbi of Egypt. Of the issues brought up to el-Sisi that were of concern to the Jewish American delegation, one was the disrepair and neglect of the cemeteries.

In a JN interview with Douek, now New York City planning commissioner, he said within hours of his bequest, el-Sisi had ordered a fleet of trucks to remove the garbage and workers to delicately unearth the graves.

“I was so fortunate to be able to speak personally to el-Sisi and impress upon him why preserving Egypt’s Jewish cemeteries was so important to the Sephardic community in New York, which is made of about 80,000 Jews,” he said.

Douek said whether a Jew can trace his or her heritage back to Ashkenazic or Sephardic lineage, every Jew today has a historical connection to the Jewish community that once thrived in Egypt.

“There is no doubt that whether you are an Ashkenazi or Sephardi or Mizrachi Jew, somewhere you have an ancestor who lived in Egypt because, centuries ago, that’s how the world was,” Douek said. “Over the centuries, Jews wandered the world for work, for trade or for safety. So, there’s no doubt that every Ashkenazi Jew most likely has an ancestor buried in Egypt, and that’s why this preservation project is so important.”

For more information about the Cairo Jewish cemetery project, send an email to contact@atzmotyosef.org.

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