DECEMBER 23 • 2021 | 23
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 chap-
ter 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 expand-
ed around and even encroached into the
land of the Jewish cemeteries with roads
and makeshift buildings. The marble grave-
stones 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 diplo-
macy 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-Si-
si.
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 gar-
bage 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 commu-
nity 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 commu-
nity 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 cen-
turies, 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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