חיים דועכים: ספרייה מנציחה את יהודי מצרים (אנ')

Ebbing life: A library memorializes Egypt's Jews By Alan Cowell - (taken from The New York Times Monday, April 10, 1989 -> Cairo - as its numbers dwindle toward what some see as [UNCLEAR] extinction, Egypt's Jewish community has built a library of Talmudic and Rabbinical works dating to the 16th century and rated by some as the richest in the Arab world. -- The Jewish community in Egypt once numbered between 70 000 and 100 000, said Prof Asher Ovadiah, the Israeli director of the Israeli Academic Center in Cairo - an institution implanted after Egypt's 1979 peace with the Jewish state. These days, he said, the community numbers around 180, some in Cairo and some in Alexandria. -- The makeup of Egyptian Jewry "Egyptian Jewry was formed by a combination of the autochtonous community and the waves of immigration that came mostly from the countries of the Levant, Turkey, the Aegean archipelago, Greece, Corfu, Italy, France, the Iberian peninsula, North Africa and Tripoli," wrote Simon Shamir, a former director of the Israeli Academic Center in Cairo and now Israel's ambassador here. -- The community, he said, was fundamentally Sephardic but it was stamped by a particularly Mediterranean character, trading in Ottoman and modern times with Italy, Greece, and Turkey, where many of the library's books were printed. Jacques Hassoun, an Alexandrian-born physician and expert of Egyptian Jewry now living in Paris, wrote recently that the Jewish community "straddled the world of commerce and culture and "the almost forgotten people of the old Jewish quarters" where living conditions were described as wretched. "The special attribute of this community lay in its pluralism, its perseverance, and its remarkable ability to change," he said. After the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 and the war of 1956, Professor Ovadiah said, many Jews began to feel nervous about their future and no longer wished to keep Hebrew texts at home. Instead, they took them to their synagogues and left them there. The most recent Jewish exodus from Egypt, he said, followed the 1956 war and the nationalization of property carried out under the revolutionary regime of President Gamal Abdel Nasser. Searching in dusty corners, researchers found between 60,000 and 70,000 books after the effort to build the library for the use largely of scholars, both Israeli and Egyptian. It is a faithful replica of the Jewish community here. Oldest works are a study of rabbinical Teachings printed in 1522, and a Talmuder Study from 1528, he said. - The collection was among the most important outside Israel's own National Library. - The books in the Library were printed in many places Cairo, Alexandria, Jerusalem, Istanbul, Venice & Livorno in Italy and Basel, Switzerland, they represent, professor [?] said, "a solid basis for research in Judaism and rabbinical literature and the cornerstone in the documentation and preservation of the Jewish heritage in Egypt." Shaar Hashamayim Synagogue on Adly Street