27 June 2007
A luxury hotel in Alexandria that had belonged to Jews until it was nationalized by Egypt in 1952 has been returned. Founded in 1929 by a French Jewish immigrant, the hotel was seized from the Metzger family in 1952 during Gamal Abdel Nasser’s nationalist revolution. Five years later the Metzgers were expelled from Egypt. Now an 86-room, four-star hotel run by the French company Accor, the Cecil Hotel was returned recently to the Metzger family, then resold to Egypt for an undisclosed amount, according to the ‘Agence France Presse’ news agency .
In its heyday, the Cecil hosted such figures as Winston Churchill and Al Capone. A 1996 Egyptian court ruling returned the hotel to its Jewish owners, but the ruling was never implemented for fear that it would establish a precedent for the restitution of nationalized Jewish property in Egypt.
