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MY SECOND EXODUS STORY
- By Arlette Cohen Gotkine
Extracts from Arlette (nee Cohen) Gotkine's
article for the Kinloss synagogue magazine (Arlette also contributed to the
Association of Jews from Egypt video 'Our time to speak'.)
"While the world has been (and still is) moved by the plight of the
Palestinians , the plight of the Jews displaced from Arab countries has
conveniently been ignored and even forgotten.
When the State of Israel was formed, Egypt, which hosted a thriving Jewish
community greatly contributing to the country's prosperity, became
overwhelmingly hostile to the newborn State, in common with all the other
surrounding Arab countries. The Jewish populations in Arab countries became
soft and easy targets of revenge, especially at crucial times of war when
the new state of Israel proved victorious.
In Egypt, the majority of Jews had to leave when Nasser, our modern age
Pharaoh, nationalized the Suez Canal. I was part of what came to be known
as "The Second Exodus," the phrase first coined by author Ada Aharoni, in
her books: "The Second Exodus," (1985), and her fascinating historical
novel: FROM THE NILE TO THE JORDAN (available through:
www.iflac.com/ada in conjunction with
Amazon.
We left silently, each family with its own personal drama, families and life
long friends separated and scattered around the world, thinking we would
never see each other again.(...)
While we were living in Alexandria, Egypt, my early recollections of the
Arab-Israeli conflict were that, after the establishment of the State of
Israel in 1948, a lot of whispering was going on between my parents and
other adults. The word "Israel" had been banned from their vocabulary and
replaced by words such as "la-bas" (French for "over there") and "Chez Nous"
("At home"). Letters from "la-bas" were sent and received via Europe and
great care had to be taken in the way they were worded because of the
censorship.
Alarm bells started to ring in our minds when my uncle was arrested in 1954
charged with being a "Zionist" - the truth was that although some of his
family were living in Israel, he was not a Zionist, and had never been keen
on going there himself. It transpired that someone in the Company where he
worked and who wanted to step into his shoes, had sent an anonymous letter
to the government informing that he had family in Israel. After spending 6
months at the "Prison des Etrangers", he won his trial against the
government but was told that he could only stay in Egypt if he moved to the
Libyan border. He had no choice but to leave Egypt, in the winter of 1954
and, after a few months in France, he went to settle in Israel. Separating
from my two little cousins was very painful but .the worst was yet to come.
Also in 1954, I was shocked by what came to be known later as "Operation
Susanna", when some Jewish youth were arrested. Our community was shaken to
the core when Samuel Azar , an engineer aged 21 and
Moshe Marzuk, a doctor aged 25, were
sentenced to death by hanging. Victor Levi and Marcelle Ninio and others,
whose names I do not recall, were sentenced to long-term imprisonment. They
were kept in prison for 17 years!
Victor had been a friend of my brother-in-law who had his telephone number
in his diary. For this reason my brother-in law was arrested and imprisoned
when the 1956 Suez war broke out, and subsequently expelled, despite the
fact that he had an Italian passport.
In 1956 friends and families, especially those holding French and British
passports were expelled - again heart-rendering separations, emotional
scenes, one big close-knit community scattered around the world.
We were the "lucky" ones because, as my father was born in Greece, we had a
Greek passport. However, we did not get much protection from our "mother
country" which, unlike the Spanish Consulate who protected their nationals
and helped them to get their money out of the country, saying they made no
difference between Spanish Jews and Spanish non-Jews, Greece said they could
not jeopardize their friendship with the Egyptian authorities because of a
handful of Jews. So, we were paupers overnight and everything we had was
robbed by the Egyptian government.
We were going to stay in our fool's paradise until. around the Spring of
1957 two big Egyptian hunks knocked on our front door one evening asking
whether "Arlette Cohen lived here". They had probably got my name from the
school register of the Lycee de l'Union Juive which was under "sequestre"
(seized by the Government) . Before matters went any further, my father
decided we had to leave the country, which we did in July 1957. He was so
panicked that we left without saying good-bye to anyone. It was traumatic..
And as they say, the rest is history.."
We have now had emotional reunions in Paris, London and Israel and are
grateful for what the majority of us have managed to achieve. Perhaps we
can set an example."
We are very glad that in May 2006, we are all going to meet in Haifa, at the
WORLD CONGRESS OF THE JEWS FROM EGYPT, organized by the world federation of
organizations of Jews from Egypt, with Prof. Ada Aharoni as President, and
Mr. Jacques Peres as Director.
Shalom,
Arlette Cohen Gotkine
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