The Cultural Center
The Cultural Center.
A building beside the church, for everything the church cannot hold.
The apparition at Zeitoun ran for three years and drew, in the words of the anthropologist Cynthia Nelson, who was there, "thousands of Egyptians of different religions and social backgrounds" — along with foreign press, scholars and diplomats. There is no place in North America that keeps its record.
There is also no place in North America that tells the story of the people who saw it — an ancient nation, older than the pharaohs' last dynasty, Christian since the earliest centuries of the faith, that arrived in the United States, in numbers, only in the lifetime of people still living.
The Cultural Center is being built for both.
Nine galleries
Five thousand years, in nine rooms.
One holds the apparition. The other eight hold the people who witnessed it — where they came from, what they gave the world, and how they got here.
I
The Night.
2 April 1968 to 1971. The photographs, the film, the press from Al-Ahram to Watani, the Patriarchate’s committee and its statement of 4 May 1968 — and the honest record of what was disputed at the time, including by the Coptic press itself.
II
What Egypt Gave the World.
Writing on ivory tags around 3200 BC. The 365-day year and the 24-hour day. The oldest surgical text on earth, which reasons from examination to diagnosis to treatment and invokes a spell exactly once. The world’s oldest known glass factories.
III
Alexandria.
The Library, and what is actually known about it as against what is told. The Septuagint, made here, which carried the scriptures into Greek. Euclid. Eratosthenes measuring the earth with a shadow. Herophilus, who separated the sensory nerves from the motor ones — a practice the West then abandoned for fifteen centuries.
IV
The Church of Alexandria.
Founded by tradition by St. Mark. The school of Clement and Origen, where Christian theology first became a discipline. Athanasius, whose letter of 367 is the earliest surviving list of exactly the twenty-seven books of the New Testament. And 451, and what it cost.
V
The Desert.
Anthony; Paul of Thebes, whom tradition places in the desert before him; and Pachomius — who by his death in 346 had eleven monasteries and more than seven thousand monks and nuns. How it traveled: Athanasius’s Life of Antony into Latin, John Cassian’s seven years among the Egyptian monks, his monastery at Marseilles, and the Rule of St. Benedict, which orders Cassian read aloud daily. Every monastery in Europe is, at some remove, a daughter house of this desert.
VI
The Language.
Ancient Egyptian, written in Greek letters plus seven kept from demotic. Manuscripts, bindings — the oldest surviving bookbindings known are Coptic, and every hardcover book is built on the same principle. Recordings of the liturgy. And the Rosetta Stone: the key to the pharaohs, read in 1822 by a Frenchman who had learned Coptic.
VII
Egypt Under Islam.
Al-Azhar, teaching since the 970s. Ibn al-Haytham on optics, in Cairo, under house arrest. Ibn al-Nafis, who described the circulation of blood through the lungs three hundred years before Europe and was not read there. The hospital Sultan Qalawun completed in 1284, which promised care regardless of means and is treating patients today. And the paperwork: the 1856 decree and the 1934 conditions under which a church could be built, which is the least dramatic and most important document in this room.
VIII
Coming to America.
Why they left, decade by decade, and what the evidence actually supports. Ten families in Jersey City in 1968. A Protestant church building on Westside Avenue for $30,000, with a $10,000 deposit the congregation could not raise — until the women sold their gold. First liturgy, 22 March 1970. Two churches in the country then. Two hundred and ninety-two in 2020, and New Jersey first among the states.
IX
The Gallery of Distinction.
Egyptians whose work the world uses: four Nobel laureates; a Coptic Secretary-General of the United Nations; the surgeon who has performed or overseen more heart and lung transplants than any other in the world; the engineer from Port Said who co-invented, at Bell Labs in New Jersey, the transistor in your phone; the geologist who helped choose where Apollo would land; the singer the Arab world stopped for on Thursday nights. Christian and Muslim, on the same wall, on purpose.
Eight of the nine draw on the material now published under Heritage. Each gallery is a naming opportunity. The schedule →
Besides the galleries
What a museum needs and a church does not.
A store. Climate-controlled, with proper shelving and boxing, because photographs and paper from 1968 will not survive a church basement.
A reading room, for anyone who wants to look at the record rather than the exhibit.
A teaching space, for school groups, catechism classes, and university seminars.
A hall for lectures, concerts, film, and the community events a building like this exists to hold.
And an oral history studio — two chairs, a microphone, and a camera. Almost everything in Gallery VIII that is specific to New Jersey does not exist in any book. It exists in the memory of people in their seventies and eighties, and it is leaving.
The oral history studio is a recommendation, not yet a plan. It is cheap, urgent and finite, and the foundation should decide whether it wants it.
Did your family come from Egypt?
The foundation is collecting the American half of this story, and it is not in any archive. Ship manifests and passenger lists. Visa papers. The first apartment. The first parish, and where it met before it had a building. Photographs of a liturgy in a rented hall. Letters home.
If you or your parents arrived between 1955 and 1980, the foundation would particularly like to record an interview. It takes an hour. Originals are returned; copies are kept with full credit.
Get in touchNaming
Nine rooms that can carry a family’s name.
A gallery on the Egyptian desert, or the language, or the crossing to America, named for as long as the building stands.