And if the holy places are hidden, the revelation is ever greater.
Eliyahu Hanavi Synagogue, the only synagogue in Alexandria, is certainly hidden. It took my friend Liana and I good while wandering around downtown Alex to find it, and the entrance was tucked away down a sketchy alley and surrounded by guards. The building was originally a church, but the Coptic community sold it to the Jews because they couldn't afford to pay the taxes levied on them by the Muslim rulers. We're all people of the book, eh?
I wish I could show you pictures, but my internet connection is way too slow here to upload pics to this blog, so I'm putting in a link to my facebook album - I hope you can all see it fairly easily.
I'd read about the synagogue in some of preliminary research on Alexandria, and really wanted to cross it off my list. Liana was interested in it herself, so we went together. I'd found a phone number for the "gaon," Ben Youssef, in my friend's Lonely Planet guidebook, so I called and made an appointment to see the place. When we got there, Ben Youssef was there to meet us and couldn't have been more welcoming and warm. He asked us a few questions about ourselves in good English, took several animated phone calls in Arabic, quoted in Hebrew and, when he couldn't remember a word in English, slipped into French for a minute. Needless to say, I was thrilled to hear French in Egypt, and picked right up with him, chatting away. French turns out to be the native tongue for most of the Jews left in Alexandria, so he was very much at ease speaking it with me, and I was so happy to get some practice. When I saw the old and well-worn volumes of Moliere and Racine on the shelf behind him, I knew I was in a good place.
The synagogue caretaker, Abd el-Nabi, took us around the synagogue, while Ben Youssef did whatever you have to do to run a defunct synagogue. The place itself is absolutely beautiful - and beautifully maintained. The temple (المعبد اليهودي, in arabic) was in its heyday when Alexandria alone had a population of around 40,000 Jews - a thriving, European ex-pat community filling up cosmopolitan Alexandria from around the turn of the century to the end of World War II. After the creation of the state of Israel, Nasser's nationalizing spree, and the Six Day War, Egyptian Jews began a second exodus - today there are only 4 Jewish men and 17 Jewish men in Alexandria, all over 65 years old. 21 Jews. They don't have enough men for a minyan, so they only have services on Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur and Sukkot. They import a rabbi, and invite Jews from Cairo and from Israel and all over the world to fill their beautiful, ghostly synagogue.
Abd el-Nabi is a Muslim, but he's worked at Eliyahu Hanavi for 25 years, and his daughter works there now too. He speaks Hebrew, has read Torah, and works with Jews every day. He knows more about the synagogue than most anyone else. He's got a wicked smile, a welcome for everyone, stories to tell all day and all night, and a constant perfume of cigars. I liked him a lot.
After we wandered around the synagogue to our heart's content and listened to Abd el-Nabi's stories, we went back to the office to say goodbye to Ben Youssef. We exchanged phone numbers and he declared that we have a father in Alexandria now. The Jewish community here is so small, so endangered and so indestructible, and they welcomed us with open arms.
After we left, we went to a delightful French pastry shop and had ice cream and coffee looking out over my favorite vista in Alexandria, Saad Zaghloul square and the Mediterranean. Waving palm trees, blue water, consulates and hotels, horse-drawn carriages crawling by, good food and good company. On impulse, we took a horse-drawn carriage with red wheels and bells back home, and just soaked the atmosphere of an Alexandria that had treated us well that day.
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