Published: 14 January 2026
Last updated: 15 January 2026
The man behind the desk hesitated when he reached the line that listed her religion. He looked from her ID back to her face as if the two did not belong to the same person.
Magda Haroun recalls the encounter with a tired smile. It happens often. “They look at my ID and they look at me and say, ‘Is it true?’ I stand up and tell them: look, two arms, two legs, no tail. My nose isn’t that bad. I am a human being like you.”
In today’s Egypt, she is often the first Jew that people have ever encountered, but Cairo was once a Jewish hub, a community that included Moses Maimonides and the Saadia Gaon, and, more recently, actress Leila Mourad and pioneering animators Herschel, Shlomo, and David Frenkel.
Today Haroun cares for a community that exists more in memory than in life. She oversees 12 synagogues and scattered community graveyards, including Bassatine — one of the oldest Jewish cemeteries in the world. They are the remaining fragments of a once-vibrant world.
It is a lonely task in a city where few Jews remain. “Sometimes I hear my own footsteps too loudly,” she said. “It reminds me that I am walking where hundreds once walked together. There are days when I enter a synagogue and feel like I am walking into my father’s house after everyone has left.”
She is not just managing buildings: she is carrying the psychological residue of an entire history, and she is painfully aware that there is no heir apparent to take up the burden.
In her downtown office, a rolled map of Bassatine leans against a bookshelf and papers about long-quiet synagogues rest in uneven piles. Memory is an almost physical pressure.
