By Matt Lebovic - December 1, 2021
Surrounding Cairo’s Tahrir Square, houses confiscated from Jewish families host Egypt’s top foreign embassies. To this day, ambassadors from Germany, Switzerland, and the United States work or live in homes expropriated from Jews after 1948, while other formerly Jewish-owned homes became the Great Library of Cairo and government offices.
The expulsion of 850,000 mostly Mizrahi (Middle Eastern) and Sephardic Jews from Arab and Muslim countries took place before, during, and after the Holocaust. As nationalist Arab leaders aligned with Nazi Germany in the name of oil and expelling the British, Jewish communities were targeted for pauperization, expulsion, and murder.
Despite the region’s centrality to Jewish history, the narratives of Middle Eastern Jews have long been considered “supplemental” in collective Jewish memory, as well as that of the rest of the world. One of several reasons for the marginalization of their accounts is that Mizrahi Jews developed different ways of telling their stories, according to historian and journalist Edwin Black.
“The Sephardic and Mizrahi communities have always been insular,” Black told The Times of Israel. “At the same time, in most major Jewish organizations our collective memory is an Ashkenazic collective memory.”
In 2014, Black worked with Israeli and Diaspora Jewish officials to implement an annual observance on November 30 commemorating the expulsion of Jews from the region. The remembrance is called Yom HaGirush, or Day of the Expulsion, and awareness of the commemoration is slowly spreading.
Read More: Times of Israel