When Passover begins at sundown tonight, Joseph Wahed will say his
prayers and listen to the story about how the Jews fled ancient Egypt.

The story has special resonance for Wahed and the 250 Egyptian Jews
who will attend service at Peninsula Temple Shalom in Burlingame.
They, too, left Egypt.

Their journey, however, was a modern one, prompted by increasing
tensions between Arabs and Jews in the latter half of the 20th
century and part of a larger exodus of Jews living in other Arab
countries. An estimated 60,000 Jews left Egypt after 1948; experts
say only about 100 remain in the north African nation.

That weighs heavily on Wahed's mind, and gives greater meaning to
tonight's service. It's the first time, he says, that the Bay Area's
Egyptian Jews will hold a communal Passover service.

``That's important because who knows when we'll be able to do it
again,'' said Wahed, who helped organize the event. ``We're the last
generation of Egyptian Jews.''

Wahed considers this the 50th anniversary of what he calls the
``Second Exodus.'' He marks 1952, when King Farouk abdicated the
throne, as the start of this modern diaspora.

Scholars say it began earlier, around 1948 when Israel was founded.

``Since the founding of the state of Israel, Egyptian Jews have been
pressured or compelled or forced out of Egypt in a series of waves
until there's no one left that is Jewish,'' said Charles Hill, a
research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford and a lecturer
at Yale University.

Aaron Breitbart, a senior researcher at the Simon Wiesenthal Center,
said that Egyptian Jews have been dispersed to Israel, Brazil,
France, the United States, Argentina and England.

``They were running for their lives,'' he said.

Officials from the Egyptian Consulate did not return phone calls.
Government officials, however, have denied that Jews were persecuted
in Egypt following the creation of the Israeli state.

Raymonde ``Remy'' Pessah disagrees. She left in the mid-1960s after
her fiance was released from a detention camp. They went to Paris and
stayed there six months before immigrating to the United States in
1970. She now lives in Los Altos with her husband, Joe Pessah, acting
rabbi of the Karaite Jews of America, a Jewish sect that follows the
Bible but not the Talmud. He will conduct the service tonight.

Their surname means Passover in Hebrew, although the Hebrew word also is spelled Pesach.

``For me, Pessah, the exodus, reminds me exactly of my life,'' she
said. ``Every year, I look at it as my life: The Jews left Egypt to
go to the land of the free.''

Though neither wants to return, both Pessah and Wahed say they have
fond memories of Egypt -- of boating on the Nile, playing soccer in
the street and of visiting Alexandria. They say they have nothing
against Egyptians, but animosity toward their former government and
some of their old neighbors clearly lingers.

Wahed wants the Egyptian government to compensate him and others for
lost property, including his father's two-story villa in a suburb of
Cairo and six jewelry stores. He and members of his newly formed
group, Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa, call
themselves the ``forgotten refugees of the Middle East'' and want
people to hear their story.

``We want to tell the people of America and of the world: When Israel
was created, two refugee problems were created,'' he said. ``The
Palestinians in Israel and the Jews in the Arab world.''