Food is a main ingredient in most folk or religious occasions in Alexandria. Rites of passage, such as birth, weddings and funerals include certain foods or rituals associated with cooking utensils, such as the pestle and mortar and the sieve in birth celebrations. Religious practices, whether fasting, feasts or celebrations of holy days, revolve equally round food and prayer. The ritualistic consumption of certain foods at certain times has evolved, over the centuries, into somehow sacred lay habits that are more associated with availability and tradition rather than need. Only the slaughter of sheep at Bairam has retained its religious significance since the dawn of Islam. Indeed, as a country with a majority of Moslem citizens, there is a serious observance of Islamic feasts and practices, some of which are not indigenous. A number of foods, particularly sweets such as Om Ali and kunnafa, were introduced by the Fatimids and the Mameluks, who were not Egyptians. Many more Christian foods, though, are imports. Egypt has its own local Orthodox Christians, who pride themselves on being the descendents of the Pharaohs. In addition, almost every Christian denomination was represented in Alexandria. There were members of the Anglican, Protestant, Greek Orthodox, Armenian Orthodox, Armenian Catholic, Syrian Catholic and Latin Catholic churches, in addition to smaller communities of Maronites and Syrian Catholics. These were mainly the foreign communities who had settled in Alexandria, and had their own houses of prayer as well as cemeteries. Many had their own foods at religious occasions too. The Jews are perhaps the most peculiar community in Alexandria, for it is wrong to call them a foreign community. Many were part of the indigenous population, and looked, dressed and spoke like the Egyptians. Some were poor and lived in the same districts as the locals round the port area. Souk el Sammak el Kadim and Wikalet el Lamoun had impoverished Moslems, Christians and Jews living in the same streets. They were all Egyptians and were virtually indistinguishable from each other, in dress, language and eating habits. In addition, many others came as refugees from around the Mediterranean, the Balkans, East Europe and Russia. Escaping either pogroms and persecution in Europe, or the Bolshevik Revolution and then Nazism, they found security in Alexandria and integrated easily as part of Alexandrian social life. There were poor Egyptian Jews and wealthy foreign Jews, and they did not have a distinctive cuisine: the poor ate ful and the rich ate French food. Many of the Jews in Alexandria were not particularly orthodox, and so were not particular about kosher. If they were strict about their meat, all meat was halal and therefore kosher, and they could avoid Monaco and its mortadella. Most didn’t, however, and, along with the generally secular mood of the city, they shared the food of the communities resident in Alexandria, for many of them were indeed members of those communities. However, certain foods were eaten on certain religious occasions.