CLEMENT SOFFER

USING POLITICAL INFLUENCE TO BENEFIT KLAL ISRAEL

SARINA ROFFÉ

FROM THE TIME HE WAS A CHILD IN EGYPT WHERE HE WAS JAILED AS A TEEN, TO HIS BUSINESS SUCCESS AND NOW RETIREMENT IN FLORIDA, CLEMENT SOFFER HAS VOLUNTEERED IN WAYS THAT HAVE A LONG AND LASTING IMPACT ON KLAL ISRAEL AND THE JEWISH PEOPLE.

Clem’s contributions include saving cemeteries in several countries, building synagogues and helping with the rescue of Syrian Jews in the early 1990s. The harshness of his childhood in Egypt is the inspiration for his lifetime commitment to saving our communities.

In 1956, when Clem was just 15, President Nasser had taken over and was imposing terrorism on the Jewish communities. Egypt’s Jewish population was crumbling. “It was 3,000 years in the making of one of the oldest Jewish communities on the planet, a very wealthy community, and I had a front row seat to comprehend the scope of it.”

In October 1956 a war broke out between Israel and Egypt, the Rabbinate was swamped with Jews wanting to escape and leave Egypt due to Nasser terrorizing the Jewish community. Nasser imprisoned 20,000 Jews in camps similar to concentration camps and took their wealth and property. The Rabbinate was responsible for, the government recognized, issuing official birth, marriages and death certificates. Egypt used this documentation to issue exit visas needed for Jews to depart.

Working with Rabbi Abraham Choueka zt’l, Clem and a team hurriedly began preparing documents for all the Jews to leave.

“My daily assignment for six months was to create certificates for them and obtain visas to any country willing to take Jews. I prepared their documentation, at the government office, for them to exit the country and then I booked travel tickets paid for by the Rabbinate. They would leave by a ship from Alexandria and I’d make sure they exited.”

“In 1957, when I was 16, I was arrested by the secret police and accused of being a spy for Israel. I was tortured for eight hours by policemen trained by Nazi SS officers who were in Egypt and hired by President Nasser. They demanded I sign a document saying that I was a spy from Israel, and I was sending Egyptian Jews to Israel who would come back and fight Egypt.

“I knew if I signed that document I would hang in a public square and G-d knows what would happen to my family. I refused to sign, and was saved by the Swiss Red Cross. I had to renounce my Egyptian nationality and was expelled immediately with a few dollars in my pocket and a blank document to travel stamped in red “dangerous for the public security.” I was 16 and I believe Hashem saved me to do many great mitzvot for the rest of my life.”

With a recommendation from Rabbi Abraham Kalmanowitz A”H, Clem was able to get a student visa with the help of Senator Jacob Javits and studied at Mirrer Yeshiva in Brooklyn. His family was forced to stay back. A few years later, he sponsored them to come to the United States.

By the age of 20, he was the founder and a board member of Ahava Ve Ahva Congregation, the first Egyptian Jewish Synagogue in Brooklyn, on Ocean Parkway and Avenue R.

Always active in Jewish causes, Clement was Vice President of the International Sephardic Education Foundation from 1983 to 2000.

Years later, when it came to hearing about the suffering of Syrian Jews, Clement did not have to be asked to join the massive effort to help free them from the tyranny of President Hafez El Assad.

“It reignited the deep wounds of my youth and the suffering incurred because I feared that those 4,500 Jews remaining in Syria would be massacred.”

From 1990 to 1994, he was Executive VP of the Council for the Rescue of Syrian Jews and played a very prominent part in the 1992 airlift and rescue of the 4,500 Jews remaining in Syria.

Months later, the Oslo agreement became an issue. Clement and a group of leaders met with Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin to stop the accords from being signed. They were unsuccessful.

In 1993, he received a Congressional Award for championing international human rights issues which was entered into the Congressional Record. He received many congratulatory letters including those from Governor Mario Cuomo, Senators Joseph Lieberman, Charles Schumer, Bob Kestin, Daniel Inoue, and Frank Lautenberg.

SAVING CEMETERIES IN EGYPT

The issue of cemeteries and how they had been destroyed and desecrated over the years in many countries where the Jewish communities have declined was brought to Clem’s attention.

In 1989, he became a board member of Asra Kadisha, an international organization in Monsey, NY dedicated to protecting Jewish cemeteries from destruction. He was instrumental in saving Jewish cemeteries in Ukraine, Portugal, India, Egypt, Germany, and Belarus. But the Egyptian cemeteries were his most passionate project.

In 1989, Clement was made aware of the desecration of the El Bassantine Cemetery in Cairo, where he was born. The cemetery once stood 50 miles outside of Cairo but with sprawl, was now in the center of the city on valuable land. The government was planning to demolish it and build a road through it. What to do?

Just weeks before, Clem attended a fundraiser for Congressman Bob Mrazek, his Long Island representative. Clem called Congressman Steven Solarz, chair of the Foreign Relations Committee and together they met with Egyptian authorities. Egypt wanted $100 million to reroute the road.

Devastated, he went with Solarz on the congressional interbuilding subway. Coincidentally Congressman Mrazek was in the same car! Together they lobbied the House Appropriations Committee to hold up the $2.3 billion in aid to Egypt unless the cemetery was saved. Still the move had to be approved by the Senate Appropriations Committee.

Coincidentally, during services the next Shabbat, he sat next to Edmond Safra A”H in the Fifth Avenue Synagogue. He explained the situation to Mr. Safra, who invited him to a reception for the International Monetary Fund in Washington, DC. While there, Safra introduced him to Senator Frank Lautenberg (NJ) who sat on the Senate Appropriations Committee. He met with the Senator and obtained the needed committee approval.

The Egyptians were informed that $2.3 billion in funding would no longer be received unless the cemetery was saved. They agreed to build a bridge over the cemetery and evict 5,000 squatters living on the graves.

Believe it or not, that was just the beginning. Cemetery slabs had been stolen. Walls had to be built. Garbage had to be cleaned up. The enormous cost was borne by Mr. Safra and Nessim Gaon, of Geneva A’H.

“In 1989, I hired Dan Bahat, an archeologist from Israel, to analyze this cemetery and learn the topography before I restored it, so I did not cause any damage. El Bassatine cemetery is built on 10 tiers of level burials, so what you see up top is not all the cemetery. I was shocked by this discovery. Jews do not bury one on top of the other but in Egypt, at Bassatine they did, totally unbeknown to them.”

Asra Kadisha oversaw the restoration of the cemetery in 1992. “I gave the keys to the cemetery to Carmen Weinstein, then the president of the Jewish community in Cairo. I delivered a perfect cemetery to her. She was under protection. Eight years later, she died,” said Clem.

FAST FORWARD 20 YEARS

Clem saw a video of the cemetery and was shocked at its condition in 2019. The El Bassantine Cemetery was destroyed again. Hidden sewage pipes were draining onto the graves, there were mountains of garbage and the fences had been breached. Clem raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to build a secure wall, remove the garbage and get the sewer pipes moved. He was determined to save the cemetery again.

There were mausoleums with names on them of known rabbis, including Rabbi Yehudah Maslaton, brother of Rabbi Mordechai Maslaton A”H, of Ahi Ezer, who died in Egypt in about 1934. They found the mausoleum of Chief Rabbi Haim Nahum Effendi zt’l.

Clem raised substantial funding for the restoration from the members of Ahava Ve Ahva with thanks to the assistance of their executive committee. Clem hired 40 workers, rented bulldozers and forklifts, as the project was supervised by rabbis from Asra Kadisha. The project is still ongoing.

At the same time, a Jewish cemetery in nearby Fostat was found in the same poor condition. Walls and gates were erected there as well.

Both cemeteries are from the 6 and 7th centuries. Fostat was used during Maimonides’ time in the 12th and 13th century.

MORE CEMETERIES SAVED

Drawing on his experience with Egypt, Clem soon understood the value of political influence. In 1989, a Jewish cemetery in Cochin, India had been sold to the local maharaja, who was going to build apartments on top of it. He went to see Frank Wisner, the American Ambassador to India. They called Ephraim Dubeck, an Egyptian Jew who was Israel’s ambassador to India. By pure chance, he happened to be in India, and he presented the case to the Prime Minister. Upon further investigation, the sale of the cemetery was illegal, and the government returned it back to the community.

Similarly in Faro, Portugal, the government was going to build a soccer stadium right next to the Jewish cemetery, which has 107 graves dating from 1838 to 1932. Faro is the capital of the Algarve region in southern Portugal. The city was home to a large Jewish community until 1497, although a number of Jews continued to live there as conversos. In the fifteenth century, the time of its peak, Faro was a well-known center of Hebrew printing. In 1481, Samuel Porteira printed the first book in the history of Portugal: an edition of the Pentateuch in Hebrew.

The builders didn’t have enough rest rooms for the stadium, so they were going to put portable rest rooms on top of the graves in the cemetery when there was a game and the stadium was in use. Horrified at this, Clem took action. As it turned out, Portugal was getting $110 million a year from the US in military aid. Clem went to his contacts in the Senate and House Appropriations committees and claimed this was a human rights violation under the AID agreement. President Suarez was notified. He immediately notified the stadium, put walls around the cemetery and made it a historic landmark.

In Madeira, Portugal, a 13th Century Jewish cemetery was eroding due to waves and some graves fell into the water due to erosion. In a feat of engineering, Asra Kadisha was able to cement the entire hillside so it will not erode.

And then there was Ukraine, which was getting $650 million from the US to dismantle the Russian nuclear fleet in Vladivostok. Cemeteries in Ukraine are run by the town mayors, many of whom allowed flea markets to operate on the cemetery grounds each week from Thursdays to Sundays. Many of these cemeteries have famous rabbis buried in them.

Rabbi Nachman of Breslov was buried in Uman, Ukraine for over 300 years. He was the founder of the Breslov Hasidic movement and a great-grandson of the Baal Shem Tov. The rabbi had a premonition that Jews would be killed by the thousands in Uman, so he remained there to pray for them. He said if people prayed by his grave, that he had the power to pull people out of hell, the only rabbi to make this claim. Centuries later, Hitler killed more than 2,000 Jews in Uman. The land the rabbi is buried on was owned by a local farmer. He was offered $5 million to sell the land and the grave to Hassidim and he refused.

Today, more than 30,000 Jews come from all over the world to pray tehillim at the rabbi’s grave each year between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

Hearing about how these cemeteries were being used, Clem went to the Appropriations Committee, and they agreed it was a human rights violation. This endangered the $650 million the Ukraine was getting each year. The Appropriations Committee went to Ukraine President Leonid Kuchma and he made a law that cleared out the flea markets from 1500 cemeteries and all the land was returned to the Jewish people, including the plot of Rabbi Nachman. And including the Rabbi’s cemetery plot the farmer thought he owned!

In all of these cases, Clem used his contacts, and the law to influence governments to be respectful of Jewish cemeteries. He was able to get many cemeteries returned to the communities, and or restored.

SYNAGOGUE INVOLVEMENT

When living in Brooklyn he was active in Ahava ve Ahva and helped raise funds for the building on Ocean Parkway, near Mirrer Yeshiva.

A husband, father and grandfather, Clem made a life for his growing family in Long Island, where he helped develop the Commack Jewish Center and later the Chabad of Sands Point. After his children were grown, he moved to Manhattan where he attended the Fifth Avenue Synagogue and became friendly with Edmond Safra.

After retiring to Florida, he helped the Aventura community build the Bet Edmond Jacob Safra Synagogue in honor of his good friend.

“We were praying in a room in the North Tower from November to April. Most people didn’t think there were enough people for a year-round synagogue. David Braka bought the land and Edmond donated funds to begin the building. I was in Turnberry year-round, so I oversaw the construction,” he said. “I was able to raise money from Mexican, Venezuelan, and Columbian families that were all connected to the New York families and 100 years later they were reunited in Florida. I was also able to identify people to make it a year-round synagogue.”

1992 SYRIAN AIRLIFT

The Committee to Rescue Syrian Jews, the work and the airlift is a story of its own. Clem’s involvement as a vice president on the committee was critical, as was the work of Alice Sardell (president), Marcos Zalta and Jack Mann (vice presidents). The political influence from around the world was significant. Funding was blocked to Syria from multiple sources.

After four years of tough negotiations, Assad finally granted permission for the Syrian Jews to leave; but there were conditions. It had to be a round-trip ticket to show the intent that they would return.

While the tickets themselves were paid for by a private donation, there was the need for funding the resettlement itself. Mr Safra was instrumental in helping us get the resettlement funds from the UJA Federation. Suddenly, Joe Beyda of Sephardic Bikur Holim got a call that they had $26 million for the resettlement of the Syrian Jews. The funds were used for resettlement, rent, doctors etc.

“It was all about having the right influence,” said Clem. “We had to use political maneuvering to achieve our goal.”

PERSONALLY

Clem speaks French, Arabic, and English fluently and is conversant in Spanish, Hebrew and Greek. One of the founders of JouJou Jeans, he opened the following boutiques: 34th Street Bootery, Le Zoo Boutiques, and Topaz Boutiques. He closed the businesses in 1997 and is now retired and living in Florida, where he sells real estate part time.

A genealogist and historian, Sarina Roffé is the author of Branching Out from Sepharad (Sephardic Heritage Project, 2017), Sarina holds a BA in Journalism, and MA in Jewish Studies.