Our First Seder in Egypt

Although this is the second time Deborah has lived in Egypt when Passover came around, before Wednesday night she had never attended a seder in Egypt. Since this is my first trip to Egypt this was my first chance to celebrate the holiday of departure in the land we departed. Whatever bragging rights Hannah may garner from being able to say, “the first wedding I ever attended was a Medieval themed French wedding outside Paris,” will pale in comparison to her perfectly legitimate right to say, “my first seder was in Egypt.”

Not many Jews born in the last 50 years can claim to have celebrated their first seder in Egypt. According to my in-house expert, the Jewish community in Egypt may have numbered as many as 80,000 people—mostly in Cairo and Alexandria—in the first decades of the twentieth century. This was a period when huge communities of non-Egyptians called Egypt home. The Jewish community started to shrink after Israel was established in 1948. A mass exodus began in the early 1950s after Nassar came to power. The departure of the Jews from Egypt was just one feature of the Egyptian nationalist movement which defined Egyptians in ethnic terms and demanded the expulsion of many thousands of people. In the wake of the 1956 Suez crisis everyone with a French or British passport was expelled; this included many of Egypt’s Jews. (For more on nostalgic literary representations of Egypt before the departures, I recommend Deborah Starr’s Remembering Cosmopolitan Egypt, due to be published by Routledge any minute). By the late 1950s, the community was almost gone. Similar stories could be told about the centuries old Jewish communities throughout the Arab world, notably in Iraq and Morocco. In April 2009, the Jewish community in Cairo (excluding expatriates and embassy staff) might be counted in the low three digits; most are in their seventies or older.

By the time we celebrated last year’s seder, we expected to be in Egypt for this year’s seder. We thought our sojourn in Egypt might last as long as four months and that some family members would join us for Pesach here, or perhaps that we would all meet up in Israel. At the end of last year’s seder, when it was time to sing l’shanah ha’ba’ah b’yerushalayim (next year in Jerusalem), Deborah’s sister Becca and I both spontaneously sang l’shanah ha’ba’ah b’mitzrayim (next year in Egypt).

Our travel plans remained in flux, however, until February. The primary pre-condition underlying our plan to spend time in Cairo—that we could be reasonably sure that the trip would be safe for our four-month old daughter—contained many sub-conditions. One condition concerned immunizations. We consulted with several physicians to find out what immunizations a baby needed to travel to Cairo; whether these diverged in any way from the immunizations a baby would need to remain in Ithaca, New York (ten square miles surrounded by reality, as the bumper stickers put it); under what schedule these immunizations should occur; whether there was an accelerated schedule on which they could occur; whether any risks were associated with this accelerated schedule.

We learned that it was safe for a baby to receive certain immunizations on an accelerated schedule and we got clearance from the insurance company to cover immunizations given at sixteen weeks rather than waiting until Hannah’s official four month birthday. Hannah received four shots on Tuesday, March 17th, the day she turned sixteen weeks. We built in a buffer day to make sure she didn’t have any adverse reactions. We left the country on Thursday, March 19. We were in Paris at the wedding of one of Deborah’s French cousins over the weekend. By the time Hannah was officially four months old, on March 25, we were in Cairo.

Because we would have only two months in Egypt, travelling to Israel made no sense, especially since we would have to leave for Israel less than three weeks after we arrived in Egypt. We also knew that our family would not join us for whatever seder we could cobble together in Cairo.
I didn’t realize until we were in Cairo that Deborah had celebrated the seder with her parents every year of her life, even the years when she was living abroad. One year, when Deborah was living in Israel, her family joined her there. Another year she was living in Egypt and flew home to Massachusetts. While it felt important to acknowledge Hannah’s first pesach in some way, Deborah admitted it might be easier to just pretend the holiday wasn’t happening. We packed one copy of our most lightweight Hagaddah (sponsored by the Maxwell House Family of Coffees, of course) in case we had to make do with a makeshift celebration at home.

Passover in Egypt presents certain challenges. At home we keep a kosher kitchen; this was how Deborah has chosen to live her life and I agreed to at least try it out when we got married. (The experiment is coming up on its fourth anniversary). While the particulars of our house rules about kashrut are subject to some negotiation, Deborah is extremely strict about following the dietary laws associated with pesach. We clean the kitchen thoroughly and remove all food that is not kosher l’pesach (kosher for passover). In Cairo, these rules would have to be waived. We’ve found it sufficiently challenging enough to keep our Cairo refrigerator stocked. Trying to keep it stocked with food that is kosher l’pesach would be impossible.

We hadn’t been here long before we started asking around about seders. When we had dinner with Gabi, the head of the Israeli Academic Center in Cairo, we asked if he knew of any seders where we might be welcome. (He and his wife were heading home to Israel for the holiday). He told us about a seder sponsored by Cairo’s Jewish community, to be held at the 100 year old Sha’ar Hashamayim synagogue in the heart of downtown Cairo. At almost that same moment we received a text message from Samantha, a friend who is studying at the Center for Arabic Study Abroad (CASA), telling us about the same seder. Deborah also received a notice about the event, via Facebook, from her friend Noor. It seemed like Sha’ar Hashamayim was the place to go. Gabi told us he would contact Carmen, the head of the Jewish community in Cairo, to see about reserving us a place. Sam told us she planned on going too, with some friends from CASA.

Transportation presented the next challenge, as it does whenever we want to take Hannah anywhere. Cairo has something like 80,000 black and white taxis. These are small cars (Fiat is a dominant brand, along with a number of other small car models not sold in the U. S.). They rarely have air-conditioning or seat belts. They tend to suffer from other ailments, major and minor. One guidebook speculates about the possible existence of a secondary market for window handles because the black-and-whites don’t seem to have any. A friend told us that all city cabs have one back door that doesn’t open. This was confirmed during a short ride when we loaded ourselves into the back seat and the right hand door wouldn’t shut. The driver pulled a screwdriver from a tool-slot on the dashboard and tried to fix the latch. When that didn’t work, he unscrewed the handle from the inside of the front door, screwed it into the back door, latched the back door, put the handle back on the front door, shut the back door, and locked it. When it was time to get out, we had no choice but to exit on the left side of the cab. Unloading a car-seat with a baby in it into a Cairo street is not my idea of safe. Black and white cabs also don’t have meters. You negotiate a fare, either when you get in, or after you get out. If you’re a non-Arabic speaking foreigner, this means you either feel like you’re being exploitative or you’re being taken.

The new yellow taxis seem a real improvement. They do require advance planning; you have to call ahead to request a pick-up. They often have air-conditioning and they are said to have seat-belts. They use a meter. But every time we’ve used a yellow cab, the driver has been late because he’s gotten lost looking for our house. There has sometimes been one working seat-belt somewhere in the back seat. (When there isn’t, we wedge Hannah’s car-seat between the front and back seats and sit on either side, holding tight). When we’ve asked for a pick-up at the back-end of our journey, there is always some drama: either the cab isn’t where we thought it was going to be, or it doesn’t show up at all. The driver always gets lost on the way home. (Cairo drivers don’t know Maadi, and vice versa. My proudest moment in Cairo so far may have been the time I discovered, after the cab was moving, that the driver didn’t know Maadi. It was after dark. I managed to get us home.) For this particular expedition, even if we felt confident that a yellow cab would pick us up on time and be waiting for us at the appointed departure time, we did not relish the idea of asking a random Egyptian cab driver to take us to a synagogue.

For most of our family trips, we’ve hired a private car and driver (which always makes me feel like laptop colonialist). The driver we’ve used most frequently knows how to find our house (although he always seems to take one wrong turn two minutes from home). His car is new and he keeps it clean. It has seat belts, front and back, and air conditioning. He speaks and understands enough English for me to communicate with him if Hannah and I are the only passengers. On a per miles basis it’s more expensive than a yellow cab. We pay LE 250 for a full day’s journey, which sounds like a lot but amounts to a little over $40. As a point of comparison, when we’ve taken a one-way cab ride from Maadi to Zamalek we’ve paid around LE 30, just over $5. We try to remind ourselves that, if we drove into Manhattan and parked our car for the day, we’d likely pay over $40 for tolls and parking, before we even got onto the subway or into a taxi.

Before we called Abd al-Nabi, the driver, I contacted the Israeli diplomat we met when we had dinner with Gabi and Mikhal. We knew he had a car because he drove us home from dinner. I asked whether he was going to the community seder and, if so, whether we could have a lift. He told us he was celebrating the holiday in Maadi with friends, but reiterated the importance of confirming our attendance with Carmen. Security would be an issue. No one would get in who wasn’t on the list.

The ride itself was a bonus for me. It was my first trip into downtown Cairo. On the way in, we drove through the heart of the Medieval city, then into modern Cairo. It was the first time I saw incontrovertible evidence that we really were in a city. Once in central Cairo, our driver had to ask for directions four times and took at least one wrong turn. Then we pulled up in front of the synagogue.

I think I have been to two community seders in my life. The first was in West Berlin in 1978. I don’t remember entering the building that night, but I remember coming to the synagogue for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur services. A German police officer stood out front, carrying a sidearm and an automatic weapon. He was nice; we greeted him on every arrival.

Synagogue security in Cairo in 2009 is much tighter. The sidewalk in front of the synagogue has posts embedded in the cement to prevent cars from pulling up on the sidewalk—or into the alley—and exploding. Several soldiers with helmets and machine guns stood out front. We had to walk around the barriers and enter the secure area on the side away from the synagogue. After passing a security booth, our passports were examined and our names noted down by one man. Then another man checked our names off the list of expected attendees. Finally we were free to walk down the alley and enter the courtyard behind the synagogue.

The synagogue is a massive presence. I hope to see the inside of the sanctuary while we’re here. The courtyard behind it has a small, dry fountain in the middle. It was lined with rugs and hung with festive lights. Several members of the community came to greet us as we made our way through the courtyard and into the room where the seder would be held, a low ceilinged social room off the central courtyard. Long tables were set for about 100 people. At the suggestion of one of the organizers we sat in the back, by the door, where there was room for Hannah’s stroller and easy access to the courtyard if we needed to walk her around.

Some of the attendees were Arabic-speaking Egyptians who apparently spoke little or no English. Some spoke French (a woman touched Hannah’s foot and asked me if Hannah was fils ou garçon). But English was the event’s lingua franca. A table of women was dressed in conservative Muslim style. Deborah recognized a woman she had met twelve years before—an Egyptian Jewish woman who had married a Muslim. Her daughter wears the headscarf. An American family included a pre-teen boy who would be called up on to recite the four questions. There were a number of people who seemed to be affiliated with the American University in Cairo (AUC), CASA, or the other Arabic language program based at AUC. One attendee was a man Deborah knew as a fixture at Cairo expat events for many ears. (I had met him once before, when Deborah gave a talk in Philadelphia). She told me that, when she met him twelve years ago, he had been working on his dissertation for sixteen years. He was there with a man in his early twenties who I believe he introduced as his son. I didn’t think he was Jewish and Deborah confirmed that he isn’t. After dinner he took out his guitar and sat in the back of the room and sang a few numbers. He performed rather well, although I only saw one person join in the singing. I personally don’t think a guitar is out of place at a seder. When I was a graduate student and hosted seders for family and friends we always made time for labor songs, a few spirituals, and the odd Bob Marley number. But I think this was the first seder at which I’ve ever heard anyone sing Irish drinking songs.

At the head table Carmen introduced an Israeli man, here with his wife and almost grown son, who would be leading the seder. We referred to him as the rabbi but I think we later decided he wasn’t. It was often hard to tell what Carmen or anyone else at the head table said because there was no microphone. Moreover, at no point did people in the room stop talking. Carmen also introduced an ambassador. At first we thought she must be the Israeli ambassador. But when she read from the Haggadah, at the invitation of the man we’ll call the rabbi, her performance left no doubt she was American. Immediately after introducing the American Ambassador, Carmen introduced the seder’s youngest participant, Hannah. I was standing up, holding Hannah at the time so I got to absorb the warm glances of everyone who turned to look at her.

Because there was no microphone and all the guests talked all the time, this was the kind of ritual where, if you didn’t know what was going on, you wouldn’t know what was going on. Sitting next to us was a well-dressed Egyptian couple in their fifties or sixties. They made some attempts to follow along in the Haggadah, then closed the book. I tried to help them follow along on the English side of the page which seemed to help for a while. It turns out he is Carmen’s doctor and she invited him to the seder. During dinner he took Hannah for a while and flew her around above his head. When she spit up copiously on the pants of his well-cut pinstriped suit, he didn’t seem to mind in the least.

When I observed that Hannah had filled her diaper, Deborah said, “Do you want to show them how liberated American men are?” I took this as a challenge and picked up the diaper bag. The week before we had enjoyed a long afternoon visit with some Egyptian friends of Deborah’s. During the car ride home she told me she wasn’t sure whether anyone had noticed when I went into the bedroom to change Hannah’s diaper. She told me that, if anyone had noticed, it would have been worthy of comment. In Egypt, Deborah told me, diaper-changing is not men’s work. At the seder, I had no choice but to perform my liberation in public. The bathroom is a tiny affair off the courtyard: two toilet stalls and a urinal. The bathroom also holds a stove which I thought was used to make tea for the security guards. Deborah told me later that dinner was also heated up in this little white stove. The sink was outside. I saw no trash can anywhere. I pushed two chairs together in the courtyard, put down the pad, and had a changing station. I kneeled down, as I often do when working on a low surface. When I was done, the right knee of my trousers showed that I had been kneeling on a dusty courtyard. If I’d been thinking about my trousers (and my comfort) rather than about discretion, I would have set up the changing station on one of the rugs. I had to ask someone for a trash can but I didn’t really want to hand over the used diaper. He brought me a small waste-paper basket.

No wine was served during dinner. Wine of any kind is not easily procured in Cairo. In place of wine, we drank kosher grape juice. In place of the horseradish typically used as the maror (bitter herb) at American seders we ate a bitter leafy green vegetable. (Several of us accidentally ate the bitter herb when it was time to eat the green karpas, usually parsley or watercress back home, leaving us no choice but to eat karpas when it was time to eat maror). There was no haroset, a chopped-up melange of fruit, nuts, honey, and a little wine. When it was time to make a sandwich of maror, matzah, and something to represent the mortar the Israelites used to build Pithom and Ramses we used fig paste.

Dinner itself seemed to be largely a pot-luck affair. A long table against one wall was laid with a motley assortment of dishes: stuffed vegetables; some kind of sausage surrounded by french fries (good hot, not-so-good cold); eggplant in tomato sauce (very tasty); fruit salad; cookies (presumably made without leavening); crepes; macaroons. I saw no dairy products anywhere in the room, which suggested the organizers had warned all food contributers to observe the kosher stricture against mixing meat and milk. The Egyptian man who had been particularly assiduous about welcoming and seating guests carved the biggest turkey I have ever seen. It was easily twice Hannah’s size. The turkey had been stuffed with rice, a grain that is forbidden during Passover according to the rules established by the Ashkenazi rabbis of eastern and central Europe but permitted according to the rules established by the Sephardi and Mizrahi rabbis of Spain, North Africa, and the Middle East.

We had told Abd al- Nabi we would want to leave at 9. We figured this would give us time to enjoy the pre-meal rituals, eat dinner, and get Hannah home at a reasonable hour. It turns out we didn’t miss much. Samantha reported that the rabbi tried to get the post-meal rituals underway but, when he couldn’t get the congregation to stop talking, he gave up. Once it was clear the event was over, the guests were apparently shooed out fairly efficiently. This was probably a good move, not only for security reasons, but because I have never been to a Jewish event where people said goodbye quickly.

Hannah behaved as she usually did: strapped into her car seat she cried while we were stuck in traffic. Once we started moving, she fell asleep and slept the whole way home.