BACKGROUND

This is a database of birth, marriage and death announcements of the Jewish community of Alexandria that appeared in the L'Aurore newspaper in Egypt during the years 1933-1941. After the opening of the Suez Canal in 1867, Egypt became a magnet for Jews from every country looking for new opportunities. Alexandria with its great port was one of the largest Jewish communities in Egypt. L'Aurore [The Dawn] was a French language newspaper which was launched by Salonika-born Jewish journalist Lucien Sciuto in Istanbul in 1909, and published there until 1923. Sciutto restarted L'Aurore as a weekly magazine in Cairo in 1924 which appeared until 1941. There was also an Alexandria edition. This database is based on the weekly issues of that newspaper from 1933 to 1941. The year 1938 is not extant as part of this collection.

DATABASE

This database includes 2412 lines of information. The birth and death announcements occupy one line each and the marriage or engagement announcements all occupy two lines, one each for the bride and groom.

The fields in the database are:

• Record Type (Birth, Marriage, Death)
• Surname
• Given Name
• Date of Registration (The week when the event took place)
• Surname
• Father's Name
• Mother's Name
• Spouse's Name
• Issue (the issue of L'Aurore that the announcement was published in)

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The information contained in this database was extracted and transcribed by Vered Dayan. It was donated to JewishGen by Alain Farhi. He is a prominent genealogist whose Les Fleurs de l'Orient website has documented tens of thousands of Sephardim of the former Ottoman Empire.

March 2025