Twenty elderly women convened an urgent, extraordinary meeting. These were the members of the Jewish community in Cairo, and on the agenda was the election of a new president for the community and burial arrangements for her predecessor.

Former President Carmen Weinstein had passed away two whole days earlier on April 13; she had been a strong woman, childless, aged 82. It is no coincidence that there were no men at the meeting. The handful of Jewish community members includes only women, at least as far as is known. The assembled members  elected Magda Haroun, daughter of communist and intellectual Chehata Haroun. From that moment, Magda embarked on a not-very-long journey; the journey of witnessing the end of Jewish life in the land of the Nile.

Near the grave of Carmen Weinstein in the Bassatine cemetery in Cairo’s old neighborhood, minutes before Weinstein was laid to eternal rest, Haroun spoke. She turned to the Egyptian nation and begged them to live in harmony as in the past, without religious factionalism, under the flag of unity that had prevailed in times gone by.

“The members of the Jewish community are Egyptian citizens,” she added in an interview to the Al-Ahram newspaper, “Jewish synagogues are like the pyramids and the sphinxes. We will live forever in Egypt, because religion is for God and the nation is for everybody."