Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By richards on April 18, 2013

CAIRO (AP) The late leader of Egypt's dwindling and aging Jewish community was buried Thursday in one the oldest cemeteries in Egypt, the once-sprawling burial ground she tirelessly worked to restore but which has now suffered looting and is drenched in sewage water and strewn with trash.

Because of the sewage water that recently seeped up from underground, Carmen Weinstein, who died at the age of 82 in her Cairo home Saturday, was not buried near her mother Esther, but at the other end of the Jewish cemetery in the Bassatine district of Cairo.

As the community's leader for nearly a decade, Weinstein had worked quietly but persistently to preserve Jewish sites in Egypt and the memory of a once thriving community. Numbering tens of thousands in the early 20th Century, only around 60 Egyptian Jews remain in the country, mostly aging women and Jews married to Muslims or Christians and "those who choose to remain in the shadows ... Except when death comes calling," as Weinstein once wrote.

Rabbi Marc El Fassi, who held the prayers during the service, called her "wonder woman." Known as a powerful personality, she was able to push officials to restore a handful of Egyptian synagogues and the yeshiva where the 12th Century Jewish philosopher Maimonides taught, as well as private Jewish properties. She bristled at Jews abroad who treated the community as if it were dying, arguing with Jewish groups that campaigned to take some remaining Torah scrolls out of Egypt.

At a public ceremony in Cairo's downtown Gates of Heaven Synagogue, nearly 100 guests, including a handful of Egypt's surviving Jews, diplomats and Muslim and Christian Egyptians, came to pay tribute to Weinstein, then moved to the Bassatine Cemetery for the burial. The deteriorated cemetery is one of the immediate challenges facing Weinstein successor, attorney Magda Haroun, 60, who was elected to lead the community.

"I asked you to come here to see the dump we will bury her in," said Haroun sharply, addressing the media who joined the mourners at the cemetery.

The cemetery's decline mirrors the dramatic changes Egypt has undergone as its population skyrocketed and poverty grew. On the outskirts of Cairo in an area named in Arabic after the gardens that were once there, Bassatine has over the past decades grown into densely populated slum of tightly-packed redbrick apartment buildings that house poor Egyptians migrating from the countryside.

Since the late 1970s, Weinstein worked to preserve the cemetery from urban encroachment, getting a wall built and succeeding in renovating and cleaning up the ancient site, dating back to the 9th Century. She planted trees and shrubs to beautify the site.

But it has rapidly deteriorated in recent years. A wall was torn down to allow construction of a sewage system for nearby construction but the project was never finished. The wall was never restored and sewage has poured into the site. Residents have dumped trash inside the cemetery, and marble has been stripped from many tombstones.

Rabbi Andrew Baker of the Washington-based American Jewish Committee said he visited the cemetery last month with Weinstein. She confessed to him, "I never come here anymore," reflecting her disappointment at the cemetery's condition, he said.

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Egyptian Jewish leader buried in rundown cemetery

Category: Jewish American Heritage Month
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