Behind the Headlines Cairo’s ‘city of the Dead’

On the southernmost outskirts of Cairo, where sprawling urban slums mixed with middle class apartment buildings meet the desert in the area Known as Basantine, is “The City of the Dead.” It represents at once the poverty of Egyptian masses and, in part, the animosity to wards Jews in the generations of warfare and hate that followed the rebirth of Israel.

The “city” spreads over a series of Moslem, Christian and Jewish burial grounds in Basantine but the “most dilapidated,” according to an official U.S. report on the vast necropolis made known to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, is the Jewish cemetery with its uncounted thousands of graves — above ground in mausoleums and sarcophagi and below ground in family plots and individual sites.

In the Jewish cemetery, as in the others, the “city population consists of families of squatters who live with their livestock — donkeys, goats, dogs and chickens — in vandalized mausoleums and among toppled and demolished tombstones. Where once Jewish Egyptians were laid to rest, excreta and garbage foul the atmosphere and despoil graves. Yet, curiously, some imposing sarcophagi and gravestones remain undamaged in those unwalled, unfenced burial grounds.

Without electricity, sanitation, privacy or adequate water, human beings try to survive in those areas set aside for the dead. The U.S. report says that perhaps a quarter of a million people have moved into this necropolis and its environs as a result of Cairo’s acute housing shortage. In the Jewish cemetery the stench of waterless, sewerless people and their livestock is literally overpowering.

During President Carter’s peace making mission to Egypt in March, this reporter visited Basantine with Clifford Evans, the PKO General Broadcasting’s White House correspondent. The night before, in downtown Cairo at the beautiful 80-year-old Shar Shamayim Synagogue with its pathetically tiny congregation, the JTA reporter was cautioned. “Don’t go to Basantine alone,” a woman advised. “It’s dangerous. You are a foreigner and well-dressed. Be careful.”

A TOTAL WASTELAND

However, with the taxi that brought the two reporters to the cemetery never far from them, the visit passed with no sign of possible crime or violence. Among the many squatters, some watched suspiciously but most, judging from their facial expressions, appeared shy and curious. A language barrier prevented direct conversation.

The visit therefore was dominated not by fear of physical abuse but emotional depression. Here in this wasteland was clear evidence of desecration, abandonment and poverty. Structures that once protected the bodies of the dead now shelter paupers in misery. At the first mausoleum visited, typically identified by Stars of David, the taxi driver reported 20 persons lived in an inside area that seemed barely 15 yards square.

Not all the mausoleums are occupied. Attempts were made to keep intruders out of some by partial filling of doorways with bricks and mortar. Most mausoleums that were unoccupied stand gaping — their entrance doors gone, the burial vaults emptied, the door less cubicles staring like dead black eyes at their onlookers.

One can only guess as to where the bodies are that had been placed in these cubicles. Obviously, Egyptian governments have made scant efforts to preserve the sites. Who were those people interred? Sculptured, usually in French and Hebrew on mausoleums are such names as “Famille Michel Bey Sapriel” and “Familles. I and T Levy” and “Ades.”

The imposing sarcophagus of Salomon M. Fis stands high above ground undamaged in a plot strewn with debris. The most recently laid gravestone noticed was that of Esther Cohen, nee Bialobes, buried March 6, 1949, a few days before her 60th birthday. Jews, it was said, continue to be buried at Basantine.

130 JEWS LEFT IN CAIRO

Cairo had a Jewish population estimated at 100,000 before Israel’s rebirth in 1948. Today, JTA was told at the lone functioning synagogue remaining, only 130 Jews live in Cairo. In Alexandria, where 20,000 Jews had lived, about 90 remain.

An Egyptian born American, who was educated in London and is now an engineer living in a Washington suburb, told JTA that once Israel became a State, Jewish life in Egypt immediately became threatened and Jews left precipitously for Israel and elsewhere. “They (non-Jews) could not wait for us to get out so that they could get our possessions,” said the engineer, who asked not to be identified.

Nevertheless, he bears no bitterness. “Egyptian people are what you call easy going and friendly. They can be fine neighbors. I think Israel and Egypt could get along very well.”

In the current period of developing official friendliness between Israel and Egypt, it was suggested that a mark of binominal cooperation could be the restoration, as a joint venture, of the Jewish cemetery. While other needs in Egypt hold much higher priorities, a symbol of the “new” Middle East could be the eradication of “The City of the Dead,” resettlement of squatters in decent dwellings, and the restoration of the cemetery to the honor of both countries and peoples.