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This Day in Jewish History | 1927: Owner of Egypt’s Grandest Store Brutally Murdered in Cairo
David B. Green, Haaretz, 14.3.2014,
https://www.haaretz.com/jewish/.premium-1927-store-owner-killed-in-cairo-1.5328437.
Solomon Cicurel, who ran Les Grand Magasins, was stabbed to death in bed by four assailants.
On March 4, 1927, Solomon Cicurel – one of three brothers who, together with their father, owned and ran Cairo’s leading department store – was brutally murdered in the master bedroom of his Giza villa.
Cicurel was born in 1881, the oldest of the three sons of Moreno Cicurel. Moreno had immigrated from Smyrna (today Izmir), Turkey, in 1870. His first Cairo business was a textile store he co-owned in Cairo’s El Mousky district. After that, he opened the department store Au Petit Bazaar, which eventually became Les Grand Magasins Cicurel. Les Grand Magasins was Egypt’s grandest emporium, the local equivalent to Galeries Lafayette in Paris.
After the death of Moreno in 1919, his sons – Solomon, Joseph and Salvator – continued to run the family business empire. Joseph (1887-1931) was a founder of Banque Misr and the group of companies owned by the bank, whose Jewish and Egyptian owners wanted to break the foreign grip on the country’s economy.
Solomon was the senior partner in the Grand Magasins, and he lived in a mansion on al-Rihama Street, along the Nile in Cairo’s exclusive Giza district. It was there that, in the early hours of March 4, Solomon was stabbed to death in his bed. Beside him was his wife, Elvire Toriel, who was unable to offer detectives much assistance since the assailants had rendered her unconscious with chloroform.
Because of the high standing of the Cicurels in Egyptian society, the case was given top priority and, within a day, four men had been arrested for the crime, which was apparently a burglary gone very wrong. (Elvire’s jewels, kept in the bedroom, were gone when the police arrived.) Two men were Italian: the family’s chauffeur, and a friend; a third was Greek, the driver for another Cairo family; the fourth was a local Jew.
At the time, Egypt still functioned under the “capitulations” system, by which foreign nationals were tried by their own states. And because neither Italy nor Greece had death penalties, it was only the Egyptian Jew, Dario Jacoel, who faced the gallows for the crime, which he was said to have masterminded.
