Summary
The Organization of the Victims of Anti-Jewish Persecution in Egypt, initiated by Sami ‘Atiyah in 1958 to register Egyptian Jews’ property claims in Israel, treated in The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry as the vehicle of an early Egyptian Jewish identity claim framed in Ashkenazi Zionist terms that the Israeli state ultimately declined to pursue (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 3482-3518).
Details
- Sami ‘Atiyah initiated the organization in 1958 with the approval of Minister of Finance Levi Eshkol; its primary objective was to register and document the claims of Jews who lost property in Egypt — abandoned, confiscated, or sold under compulsion at below market prices — so claimants could recover moral and material damages; Shlomo Kohen-Tzidon was its legal counsel (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 3482-3518).
- By 1978, 4,000 files had been opened, including about 1,000 from claimants living outside Israel, registering private assets with an estimated value of $197 million (in 1950s dollars); Jewish communal property abandoned in Egypt was not included (Chapter 8, note 7) (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 3482-3518).
- It also sought “prisoner of Zion” (asir tziyon) status for members interned in Egypt — a designation the chapter calls “not entirely appropriate for Egyptian Jews because both before and after the 1948 war those who wanted to leave were able to do so,” raised as a way to claim acknowledgment in the only terms Israeli public culture recognized (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 3482-3518).
- The organization and its leaders were associated with the Liberal Party (a component of what eventually became the Likud), and the MAPAI/Labor governments were uninterested in a cause identified with their political opponents; even after the Egyptian–Israeli peace the Israeli government refrained from pursuing the claims for strategic and diplomatic reasons (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 3482-3518).
- Its council president, Dr. Maurice Sachs, complained that the Ministries of Justice and Foreign Affairs “would invent different excuses for not dealing with our affairs” — before the treaty, no one to speak to; afterwards, waiting for the joint committee; in the end, that the claimants had not been Israeli citizens when the property was taken: “Why for them yes and for us no?” (Chapter 8, note 8). Professor Ya’akov Meron of the Ministry of Justice suggested the government feared an Egyptian counterclaim for the petroleum Israel lifted from the Abu Rudeis oil fields during its 1967–82 occupation of Sinai (Chapter 8, note 9) (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 3482-3518).
Related pages
The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, Sami ‘Atiyah, Shlomo Kohen-Tzidon, Ada Aharoni