c. 2000 Religion News Service

ALEXANDRIA, Egypt _ The horse-drawn carriages rumbling past the Cecil Hotel are a throwback to more elegant times, when millionaire owner Albert Metzger counted Winston Churchill and novelist Lawrence Durrell among his guests.

Today, the 72-year-old Cecil _ like this ancient Mediterranean city _ is a scruffy shadow of its glamorous past. The bedrooms are dingy, and a bar once packed with Alexandria’s elite, is long gone. So, too, is Metzger, expelled from Egypt in 1956, along with thousands of other Jews.

It is a history Metzger’s family has not forgotten. And in April, Egypt’s Court of Cassation ruled in favor of the Tanzania-based relatives in their lawsuit against the Egyptian government to reclaim the Cecil.

“In all these years, I did put my faith in the Egyptian courts,” said Patricia Metzger, Albert Metzger’s daughter-in-law, who filed the lawsuit along with her two children. “I had every confidence that we were right, and that this was a case we wouldn’t lose.”

But the Metzgers’ story, and those of tens of thousands of Jews who left Egypt over the past 50 years, is not over.

Theirs is a complicated tale of loss and of recrimination that pits the Jewish diaspora not only against the state, but against Egypt’s aging Jewish community as well.

It is a story about personal claims for property left behind, but also about the fate of a religious heritage that dates to pharaonic times.

Should rare prayer books and Jewish antiquities remain in Egypt, for instance, where Jews are dwindling and dying? Or should they be sent overseas, for future generations to cherish?

“Religious articles ought not and should never be the property of a government,” argues Desire Sakkal, president of the Historical Society of Jews from Egypt, a Brooklyn-based group lobbying for the artifacts. “These were donated to the community for the sole purpose of being used in a synagogue, and special occasions for the donating families. These were never intended to be placed in a museum to gather dust.”

Egypt’s remaining Jews have dismissed such calls as callous. Like the pyramids, they say, their synagogues and Torahs are national treasures.

“Why, for a change, don’t I receive a letter offering to repair or renovate some of our rich Jewish patrimony?” wrote Esther Weinstein, president of the Jewish Community of Cairo, in the organization’s newsletter.

The finger pointing is a bitter denouement for one of Egypt’s oldest and most illustrious communities. Acclaimed singers and writers, advisers to pharaohs, pashas and kings, Jews for millennia courted and counted among the wealthy and powerful.

But Israel and nationalism changed all that. Arab anti-Semitism, fueled by the 1948 declaration of the Jewish state, drove tens of thousands of Jews from the country. Thousands more fled in 1956, when President Gamal Abdel Nasser confiscated private property, and kicked many “foreigners” out with just $5 in their pockets.

That was the case of Metzger, a Canadian citizen who built a tourism empire in Egypt. He left the country with the suit on his back, Patricia Metzger recalls, and enough money for a plane ticket to Malta.

Overall, Egypt’s Jewish population has plummeted from about 80,000 a half-century ago, to less than 200 today. So few are their numbers that neither of the two largest communities, in Cairo and Alexandria, has the 10 men needed for a minyan, or prayer group.

“We were 50,000 Jews in Alexandria. All the synagogues were full,” remembers 76-year-old Lina Mattatia, as she toured a visitor around Alexandria’s Eliahu Hanabi synagogue. “Today we are only 50, and not enough men for a service.”

The daughter of Greek immigrants, Mattatia is the last of her family in Egypt. One sister is in England. Another in Australia. Her husband is dead.

Why does she stay? Mattatia shrugged. “I’m happy here,” she said.

Alexandria’s only functioning synagogue is an empty swathe of pink Italian marble and wooden benches. Pedestrians barely give the guarded building a passing glance.

Inside, a wooden cupboard houses the scrolls from 15 synagogues once scattered around the city. What to do with the remaining buildings and other Jewish property, is the “$60,000 question,”said Meir Mishan, Israeli consul general in Alexandria.

For Jewish advocacy groups overseas, at least, the answer is clear.

“One of the most egregious examples of dispossession occurred in Egypt,” Elan Steinberg, executive director of the World Jewish Congress, told Reuters in August.

The WJC and groups like the Tel Aviv-based World Organization of Jews from Arab Countries, assert the Egyptian government has failed to address several hundred personal property claims, amounting to millions of dollars. But also unresolved, they say, is the status of many community assets, including dozens of former Jewish schools, hospitals and synagogues in Egypt.

For its part, the Egyptian government has dismissed such claims as a “non-issue,” making the distinction between Jews who lived in Egypt for centuries, and foreign passport holders like Metzger.

“Not a single claim (by an Egyptian) was presented,” said presidential adviser Osama el Baz. “And we would welcome any of these people because we still have strong ties with them.”

“There was no exodus, they were not dealt with unjustly,” el Baz said. “They were not treated as traitors or people of dual loyalty, or anything. Because they were loyal to Egypt.”

Very few Jewish lawsuits appear to have landed in Egypt’s civil courts. That stipulation exists, at least, for Israeli Jews under the 1979 peace treaty with Egypt. American and Israeli embassies in Cairo say they have received few, if any calls from Jews about confiscated property in Egypt.

Several local lawyers, including Abdel Moneim Al Sherbini, who is handling the Metzger case, say they are unaware of others taking on Jewish lawsuits in Egypt. And members of the Jewish community here say those who may have a case, often lack the papers to prove it.

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Others may wait for years. Canadian citizen Raphael Bigio finally sued Coca-Cola Co. in a U.S. federal court, after watching an Egyptian Finance Ministry decree to return his assets gather dust. Bigio’s claim: that Coke had bought the family’s confiscated Cairo property for as much as $150 million.

The Metzger family is still waiting. A lower court in Alexandria earlier ruled in favor of the family’s claim on the Cecil Hotel. That was in 1978. Now, Egypt’s state prosecutor general has yet to execute April’s ruling by the Cassation court, which has the final say in the matter.

“Our enemies say Jews have many, many properties in Egypt,” said Sherbini, the Metzgers’ lawyer. “And if the Metzgers take the Cecil Hotel, maybe other Jews will ask for their properties.”

But ironically, the Cecil Hotel lawsuit no longer concerns Jewish claimants. Of Albert Metzger’s three heirs, two are Christian. Metzger’s granddaughter converted to Islam, after marrying a Muslim in Tanzania.

DEA END BRYANT