Jews Down Under An online magazine for Australian Jews
“We are dying, we are drowning,”
says Magda Haroun, elected leader of Cairo’s Jews. In this melancholy two-minute news clip, she tells the BBC reporter that there is no future for the 12-member Jewish ‘community’ of Cairo.
Her first priority, she says, is to look after the human beings – the old ladies like Lucy, helpless and without family in an old age home. Then, it is to preserve Egypt’s cultural and religious heritage. Magda is filmed opening the Torah scrolls of the Adly synagogue, a place of worship without Jews.
The report is forthright : the Jews, who were accused of being spies, were forced to leave in the 1950s and 1960s. As the camera lingers on Magda kissing the grave of her father at the Bassatine cemetery, it’s clear that the community’s only future is death.
Article published at the “Point of no return”
Read more about the ‘Jews of Egypt’ at Harif and JIMENA
BBC Video YouTube.
Watch video “Forgotten Refugees“
Magda Haroun has no right to complain about the plight of the Jewish community in Egypt, and the sad state of the synagogues there. She was the one who rejected any aid from Israel and said she would rather turn to UNESCO than Israel for help. Well, let her turn to her “friends”, that UNESCO which hates Israel and does all it can to denigrate and undermine Israel’s reputation.
She also compared Zionism to racism.
So while I have some sympathy for the last Egyptian Jews, they are badly led by a deluded leader. They should have insisted that she accepted help from Israel when they could.
Now it’s too late.
You can’t blame Magda Haroun for the sorry state of the Egyptian Jewish community. In fact her predecessor, Carmen Weinstein, did manage to get 13 synagogues under government preservation order. UNESCO did nothing. Israel can do nothing to help either.