The Last Watchman of Old Cairo

by Michael David Lukas

Michael David Lukas' story, The Last Watchman of Old Cairo, unfolds as if he were pulling fragments from an ancient geniza and piecing them together.

It's apt for a book about an ancient synagogue (Ibn Ezra) in Old Cairo. In the world Lukas has created, Jews and others have believed for more than a thousand years that a flawless Torah scroll created by a scribe named Ezra was hidden within the synagogue's geniza.

One fragment of this story is about Joseph al-Raqb, 26, born to an Egyptian Muslim father, Ahmed al-Raqb, and an Egyptian Jewish mother, Claudia Shemarya, who is trying to understand his origins and why his parents never married.

Sacred Trash; The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza

By Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole

Imagine Rabbi Solomon Schechter cast in a role like Harrison Ford’s in the movie “The Raiders of the Lost Ark” and you’ll get the flavor of this true life, swashbuckling history of the treasures of the Cairo Geniza.

The Cairo Geniza, located in the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fustat (or Old Cairo), contained nearly 1,000 years of documents and manuscripts from one of the wealthiest and most centrally located medieval Jewish communities.

Among its 300,000 manuscript fragments are scraps handwritten by Maimonides and renowned poet and thinker Rabbi Yehuda Halevi, both of whom lived in ancient Cairo during this period.

The Angel; The Egyptian Who Saved Israel

by Uri Bar-Joseph

What would you say if someone pulled you aside and said they were writing a movie script about how a son-in-law of the late Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser became one of Mossad’s most valuable spies?

Impossible to believe? Guess again. This tale is fact not fiction. The spy in question, Ashraf Marwan, provided Mossad with valuable, accurate information pointing to Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s growing commitment to attacking Israeli across the Suez Canal in late 1973.