CAIRO, Egypt (AP) _ Egyptian Jews who have settled in the United
States, Europe, Israel and elsewhere say Egypt can never be their home
again, and some want to retrieve part of what they left behind.
They claim certificates of birth, marriage and death that tell personal
history in bureaucratic language. They long for copies of holy books
their families bequeathed to temples that these days are rarely visited
by anyone who could lift out the scrolls and by reading fulfill the
command of Jewish sages: "Every day the Torah should be as new."
Jews still in Egypt reject the claims, which the expatriates have
pressed without success in petitions to Egyptian and U.S. presidents,
ambassadors and lawmakers.
Shimon H. Alouf, who ministered to Jews of Egyptian descent in New York
for 17 years, still marvels at how many still spoke the Egyptian dialect
of Arabic when he arrived as their rabbi in 1985. He said they want
family Torahs and other items as a way of preserving their memories of
Egypt. "They identify themselves as Egyptian," the rabbi said. "People don't
want to forget where they came from."
Desire Sakkal, who was 12 when he left Cairo with his family in 1962,
is one of the leaders of the effort to bring Jewish religious items out
of Egypt.
Sakkal said that while the campaign now focuses on claiming books and
papers, the expatriates might one day demand compensation for lost
property like his father's button factory. Egypt's government maintains
Jews left because they wanted to and says none were stripped of property
or rights.
The government has left the question of the Jewish artifacts to the
tiny remaining Jewish community, which responded by asking officials to
declare some of the materials protected antiquities.