Enab Baladi – Besan Khalaf
“We were nine a month ago; we bid farewell to three individuals in February and early March, and now only six Jews remain in Syria.”
With this sentence, the head of the Jewish community in Syria, Bakhour Chamntoub, began his talk with Enab Baladi, expressing his fears about the extinction of the Jewish faith in Syria.
Over the years of the Arab-Israeli conflict, especially the Syrian-Israeli conflict in 1973, the number of Jews in Syria decreased from five thousand, the majority of whom lived in the southern part of the capital Damascus in the al-Amin neighborhood, to fewer than ten people, mostly elderly.
Chamntoub attributes the decline in the number of Jews in Syria to the migration of the youth in search of their civil rights to live, and to the lack of intermarriage among Jews.
Why did Jews from Syria migrate?
“Hafez al-Assad deliberately separated us from Syrian society; the majority of my friends were subjected to arrest and questioning because of their association with a Jew,” Chamntoub said.
He added, “I hated the identity that carried the word ‘Jew’ in a bright red font; it was a distinguishing mark that I was a Jew, which prevented people from dealing with me. Isn’t a Jew also a Syrian? Don’t we share the same homeland?”
Jews in Syria faced persecution from Hafez al-Assad’s regime, as Jews were banned from traveling outside Syria until 1992, and were prohibited from traveling between Syrian provinces. They were also restricted from owning property and participating in political and public work.
“The young Jewish people had to immigrate to Israel as waves of persecution heightened; they arranged with human traffickers to smuggle them to Lebanon and then to Israel,” according to Chamntoub.
When the government discovered that someone had emigrated from the Jews, it would arrest their family, and its members would be subjected to torture in prisons. Those who did not emigrate to Israel were forced to migrate to the United States and Europe in search of education and the freedom to practice their rights.
Chamntoub recounts the suffering of Syrian Jews in moving within Syria before 1992, “If we wanted to go to the Bludan area, for example, we needed prior approval from the Palestine Security Branch via a permit paper. Upon arrival, we would hand over the permit to the police station, and the station would inform the Palestine Branch that we had arrived and what we were doing there. Upon our return from the trip, we would go to the Palestine Branch to tell them we were back.”
Hafez al-Assad’s regime had fears about Jewish travel, the reasons for which were unclear, but security branches exploited the travel ban imposed on Jews to demand huge bribes to grant them permits.
Syrian Jews’ phobia
According to Chamntoub, Jews practiced their religious rituals under security protection from the Assad regime. There were no restrictions on practicing Jewish religious rites such as Saturday morning prayers and Hanukkah and Yom Kippur celebrations. However, during prayers, a member of the former Syrian security services would stand guard, while the former regime’s agencies increased their scrutiny of migrant Jews returning to visit the synagogue.
Seventy-two years ago, on August 5, 1949, three individuals threw hand grenades at the Jewish al-Manshara synagogue in old Damascus on the eve of Saturday prayers, resulting in the deaths of 12 people and injuring dozens more, as one of the attacks targeting the Jews of Syria coincided with the establishment of the State of Israel.
The attack later became known as the “al-Manshara Synagogue bombing,” in response to the Lausanne conference that led to the signing of the 1949 Armistice Agreement on July 20, between the Syrian government at the time and Israel, as part of a series of agreements signed by Israel with neighboring countries to Palestine.
Chamntoub believes that the former regime instilled fear within Syrian Jews about returning to visit their religious sanctuaries and homes due to what they suffered from persecution during Hafez al-Assad’s rule.
He clarified that the fears of Syrian Jews about returning are not due to societal views but because of the “phobia” from undisciplined factions, as he describes, especially after the events on the Syrian coast.
He hopes that Syrian Jews will return to preserve the Jewish heritage in Syria from extinction after their numbers have declined there.
Chamntoub said that the homes of Jews in the al-Amin neighborhood have been “pillaged” by factions, with about 30 houses belonging to expatriate Jews from the United States and Europe being seized.
The head of the Jewish community tried to contact the official in charge of delivering the houses, Youssef Hamdan, who told him that the decision to seize the houses is irreversible, and he is now trying to communicate with the government to examine the seizure.
Fears of extinction
“There was indescribable joy in meeting Syrian Rabbi Youssef Hamra and his son Henry; it was the first time we prayed collectively in the al-Farandsch synagogue in years due to the number declining to fewer than ten men,” thus expressed Bakhour Chamntoub, the head of the Jewish community in Damascus.
Rabbi Youssef Hamra and his son Henry returned from the United States to Syria to visit the Jewish neighborhood in Damascus and hold a collective prayer in the al-Farandsch synagogue after their travel to Syria became possible following the downfall of the regime on December 8, 2024.
Collective prayer in the synagogue requires ten men, and after the number of Jewish men declined to three, the al-Farandsch synagogue was closed, being the only synagogue that was open to Syrian Jews and foreigners who used to visit Syria before the eruption of the Syrian revolution in 2011.
“The heritage of the Jewish community in Syria dates back centuries before Christ. I hope that the rest of the Jews around the world will return to revive this ancient heritage and open projects in Syria to affirm their existence as part of Syria’s components,” said Chamntoub.
The head of the community is working to coordinate with its members abroad to establish a museum for Jewish heritage in Syria and restore the existing synagogues in the Jewish neighborhood and the historic Jobar synagogue, which suffered from looting and destruction.
The Jobar synagogue, which dates back to 720 BC and has been restored several times throughout the ages, is located on School Street in the center of the Jobar neighborhood and contained the oldest copies of the Torah and the Talmud in the world, in addition to housing the shrines of the prophet Elias (known in Hebrew as Eliyyahu or Elijah) and al-Khidr peace be upon him.
The site of the synagogue is not considered sacred only to Jews but also to some Muslims who believe that the shrine of al-Khidr is located in the same place, and it is also sacred to Christians due to the presence of the shrine or place where the prophet Elias is believed to have hidden according to their beliefs.
The synagogue in the Jobar neighborhood was frequented by visiting diplomats and Syrian Jews before they migrated.
Six Jews in Syria: Fears between two authorities Enab Baladi.
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