SUBJ: Talk on Ethnic Cleansing of Egyptian Jewry

Sorry about the late notice about this fascinating talk. Also, JAT will soon be announcing the establishment of a separate JAT list, JAT.Boston, for messages like this one that are of interest exclusively to people in the Boston area.

Eli Roditi and Rami Mangoubi will talk about their experiences growing up and living as Jews in Egypt, and will connect these experiences with the history of the Jewish community in that country.

Background:

The Ethnic Cleansing of Egyptian Jewry: History and Personal Experiences

Eli Roditi and Rami Mangoubi were born in Cairo to Jewish families that had lived in Egypt for generations. When Rami was a sixth grader, on the first day of the Six Day War, the Egyptian authorities knocked on his door, and took away his brother who was of college age. He was needed for ten minutes at the police station, they were told. Elie Roditi was also sumoned to his neighborhood's station for ten minutes.

The ten minutes lasted 6 months for Eli and 3 years for Rami's brother, during which Eli, Rami's brother, and nearly all Jewish adult males residing in Egypt, some up to 80 years old, were incarcerated in the notorious detention camps of Abu Zaabal and Tura, near Cairo. Detainees experienced torture; some were forced to walk on broken glass, humiliated. Some of the younger, fair skinned detainees were molested...

The ordeals experienced by Rami's and Eli's family, and by all Egyptian Jews in the modern era, did not start with the Arab Israeli conflict, or even with the rise of Zionism; they go back to the mid-19th century, when Egyptian authorities aimed to ostracize Jews from the country by denying them citizenship and employment.

Eli and Rami's families lived in Egypt's for centuries. Yet 90% of Egyptian Jews were never granted Egyptian citizenship (Rami's family and his father's had it, but they were rare exceptions). As far back as 1860, the Egyptian government started passing decrees that denied citizenship to most Egyptian Jews. One decree after another culminated in Egypt's notorious 1929 Nationality Law, a law that denied citizenshsip to nearly all Egyptian Jews, as well as to other minorities such as the Syrian Christians and the Armenians; the great majority were declared "stateless". The nationality or citizenship laws were closely followed by employment laws that denied employment to non-citizens, regardless of how many generations they lived in Egypt. Finally, as a result of the 1947 Company Law, Egyptian Jews and other minorities were fired en masse. In 1948, Egypt went to war attempting to destroy Israel, the only country in the Middle East that would grant Egyptian Jews and other
Jews from Arab countries citizenship.

Anti-semitism and anti-Zionism were therefore two sides of the same coin: the desire to rid Israel and the countries that invaded her of Jews. Those who continued to stay in Egypt through the sixties were severely punished for it. We will also find out about Egyptians who were protective of their Jewish friends, and who still keep in touch more than three decades later.

Like many Jews from Arab countries, Elie and Rami grew up seeing, and hearing about, historical events that are rarely in the writings of today's Middle East historians. The incarceration in the detention camps of Abu Zaabal and Tura, the 1948 massacres in Cairo's Jewish quarter, Egypt's welcoming of Nazi war criminals fleeing justice, Egypt's granting of citizenship to these Nazis while simultaneously denying citizenship to Egyptian Jews, ... all this remains absent from the textbooks of history.

In this lecture, Eli Roditi and Rami Mangoubi will talk about their experiences growing up and living as Jews in Egypt, and will connect these experiences with the history of the Jewish community in that country.