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.
Comments9
Deborah Stone9 June at 09:13 am
https://www.facebook.com/D.O.M.Egypt
Traci Safer West7 June at 05:02 pm
How can I find Magda? I’m in Cairo with my daughter and would love to invite her to dinner!
Deborah Stone22 January at 09:54 am
I have passed your email to the journalist concerned who will pass it on to Magda.
Mahu Gaëlle21 January at 09:58 pm
Bonjour
Savez vous s’il est possible de rentrer en contact avec Magda Haroun car j’aimerais lui poser des questions dans le cadre de mes recherches généalogique sur mes ancêtres juifs sepharade italiens ayant vécu à Smyrne en Turquie puis en Egypte au Caire
Merci d’ancêtres pour votre aide
Cordialement
Michelle Braunstein19 January at 08:32 pm
I too am descended from Egyptian Jews, my father violently expelled along with his brother and parents, and other relatives. I’ve met Arab Egyptians who had no idea we existed there since antiquity, however I have met Copts, Indigenous to Egypt, who knew too well our history and what happened to us, as they also experienced this trajectory of persecution by the Islamosocialist complex.
I’ve followed Magda Haroun’s story since 2013, when I began some research and initially bought into an narrative led by certain scholars that it was 1948 that was the catalyst for Jewish expulsion, however the Arab-Muslim treatment of Copts throws that theory into a very different light, as well as the fact there was a deadly anti-Jewish riot in Cairo in 1945 and of course the Farhud in Baghdad was in 1941.
More stories about the Jews of the Middle East need to be told, especially at this time. Westerners need to understand this trajectory and what dhimmitude entails.