During that time this area belonged to the Delta Land Company which created Maadi in 1907. The rocky plateau was leased to the New Zealand Forces, and for the next six years became New Zealand's main overseas base.
A British interrogation centre was also located in Maadi. In July 1942, at the height of the Western Desert Campaign, two German radio operators revealed under questioning that they had been using a copy of Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, found among their possessions, as a codebook. Their equipment, stored on a houseboat on the River Nile, had been examined by a young signals officer from the Egyptian army, future president Anwar Sadat.
Jewry
A large Jewish community lived in Maadi until the mid-twentieth century. Unlike the haute juiverie of Zamalek and Garden City, the Maadi Jews were well-off professionals - lawyers, accountants, small businessmen and teachers - who spoke French, English and Arabic fluently and had been living in Maadi for generations. Biton synagogue was the main Jewish place of worship in the district.
In the wake of the Israeli Operation Susannah (1954) and the subsequent rise of anti-semitism in Egypt, many Egyptian Jews fled. Of those who remained, almost all were expelled from Egypt during the Suez Crisis (1956) as "enemy nationals": most Egyptian Jews were dual citizens of Britain or France.
By 1965, only approximately 4,000 Jews remained in Egypt, and two of Cairo's twenty-nine synagogues remained open
