Three Israeli journalists in Cairo joined eight elderly Jews in the Chaar Hachami Synagogue to complete the minyan during the Rosh Hashanah services. The service was also attended by a young woman from the U.S. studying at the American University in Cairo, a Moslem guard and a U.S. TV crew.
“It was one of the saddest and strangest services I have ever attended,” Zeev Shiff, Haaretz’s special correspondent in Cairo, wrote today. He and the other journalists reported that the Jewish cemetery in the Egyptian capital was completely neglected. They said most of the thousands of tombstones were in ruins and the inscriptions were discernable only on a few.
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