ASPCJE

Summary

The ASPCJE (Association pour la sauvegarde du patrimoine culturel des juifs d’Egypte), founded in Paris in September 1979, treated in The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry as the most active and successful of the post-peace initiatives to preserve Egyptian Jewish heritage, connected with nearly every organized Egyptian Jewish activity of the 1980s (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 3546-3576).

Details

• Its formation was inspired by a December 1978 public meeting on Egyptian Jews of about 400 people at the Centre Rachi in Paris (Chapter 8, note 22); during the early 1980s it held monthly events in Paris and from 1980 to 1986 published twenty-five issues of a quarterly journal, Nahar Misraïm (The Nile River); its leaders sought out contacts with Egyptian Jews in Israel and the United States (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 3546-3576).
• Its principal animators included several former communists who had worked with Henri Curiel and the Rome Group — Jacques Hassoun, Raymond Stambouli and Ibram Gabbai — joined by other sectors of Egyptian Jews around Paris and younger left activists such as Eglal Errera; the tone of its publications reflected this leftist, no longer communist, nucleus. Hassoun’s three trips to Egypt in 1977 and 1978, his first return since his expulsion as a communist in 1954, prepared the way for the organization (Chapter 8, note 25), and he served as editor of Juifs du Nil (Chapter 8, note 26); Jacques Stambouli, Raymond’s son, edited the lavish photo essay Juifs d’Egypte: Images et textes (Chapter 8, note 27) (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 3546-3576).
• Its dominant, though unofficial, outlook was “neo-Bundism-diasporic Jewish nationalism — the same orientation militantly rejected by the Rome Group in the 1950s (see Chapter 5)” [cross-reference as printed; the Rome Group is treated in Chapter 6]; its leading figures were not Zionists but not hostile to Israel’s existence, and several had public records of supporting Palestinian national rights as an essential element of a peace based on the coexistence of Israel and a Palestinian state (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 3546-3576).
• It contributed hundreds of thousands of francs to finance Carmen Weinstein’s efforts to construct a wall around the Jewish cemetery at Basatin, Cairo, and engage a guard against squatters (Chapter 8, note 28) (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 3546-3576).
• Its example inspired Egyptian Jewish organizing elsewhere, including Paula Jacques’s work in France and the Historical Society of Jews from Egypt initiated in Brooklyn in October 1995, whose leaders had been in contact with Hassoun and the ASPCJE (Chapter 8, notes 23, 29) (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 3546-3576).

Related pages

The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, Jacques Hassoun, Henri Curiel, Rome Group, Karaite Jews of America