This Times of Israel blog by Hussein Aboubakr makes for painful reading: it tells the tragic story of the 400 Jews arrested as ‘Israeli PoWs’ in 1967, after Egypt’s defeat in the Six Day War . Some were tortured and sodomised.
Following the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, and the subsequent Arab-Israeli wars, the Egyptian government, along with the rest of the Arab world, decided to strip, banish, and imprison the Jews in their lands.
Hussein Aboubakr
Some 100,000 Egyptian Jews fled to Israel, North America, and Europe. A sizable minority of Egyptian Jews remained to face the horrors of Arab rule.
Following the Six Days War, the Egyptian government arrested every Jewish male in the country and detained them in Abu Zabaal, a major detention facility in Cairo still operative till this very day. Jews were arrested wherever they were, bedrooms, schools, buses, and workplaces.
Upon arrival to Abu Zabaal, Jews were greeted by the chief Rabbi crucified above the gates (he was strung up but not killed -ed). They had to pass under the Rabbi into the nightmares the Egyptian officers had prepared for them. Upon arrival, they were met with a barrage of insults, kicks, and punches. Then they to choose a female name each, because that’s how it works in my part of the world, being a woman is the ultimate degradation.
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