The overthrow of the al-Assad regime by rebel forces in early December has some Jews of Syrian origin dreaming of their ancestral land being enveloped in a wide-ranging Middle East peace blanket involving Israel and Saudi Arabia. There are those who even hope to someday fly back and visit the places that shaped their forebears’ lives.
That is how Joseph Dweck, for one, imagines things, while acknowledging that this scenario contains enormous qualifiers.
“If it were safe and they were welcome, sure,” said Dweck, the senior rabbi at the Spanish and Portuguese Sephardi Community of the United Kingdom, a synagogue in London, when asked in a recent video call whether natives of Aleppo, the city of his ancestors’ birth, or their descendants would avail themselves of such an opportunity. But, he said, “There’s no indication of that at the moment.”
It’s something Dweck, who was raised in Los Angeles, said he would consider doing if the situation in Syria stabilizes. His great-great grandfather, Yousef Beyda, moved from Aleppo to New York in 1901. Dweck’s great-grandfather, Beyda’s son-in-law, considered returning to the city, Syria’s second largest, to live but remained in New York and later moved to California and established a successful linen business.
Syrian Jews whom Dweck knows followed the dramatic developments of the rebellion against dictator Bashar al-Assad in late November and early December with “excitement,” while being “pained” by the suffering of ordinary Syrians, he said.
A few handfuls of Jews remain in Syria, a dramatic drop from their presence over two millennia. It is estimated that in the 1940s, some 30,000 Jews were living in the country.
Contemporary Syrian-Jewish population figures are hard to come by, but several people interviewed for this article estimated that 50,000 to 100,000 Jews of Syrian descent live in the United States, primarily in and near Brooklyn, New York. Other centers exist in Mexico and Argentina, with pockets in the Colombian capital of Bogota, in Manchester, England, in Miami and in Jerusalem. Elsewhere in Israel, they said, Syrian Jews have merged with the general populace and are less distinct.
The Brooklyn communities that three of the interviewees emerged from were, and remain, tradition-based and abound with religious, cultural and charitable organizations, they said. Men tend to establish, and work in, retail businesses, while women often stay home to raise the children. People frequently marry those they grew up with and got to know over many years.
Syrian-Jewish neighborhoods in Brooklyn “are growing by leaps and bounds,” with schools and synagogues “opening every year,” said Rabbi Richard Hidary, a professor of Jewish history at Yeshiva University, three of whose grandparents emigrated from Aleppo to New York.
Hidary lives three blocks from where he was raised in the borough’s Gravesend neighborhood and near his wife’s parents. “Most people live near their families and maintain childhood friendships throughout life,” he explained.
Chen Harkov, who is not a member of the community, gained some insight during the 14 years she lived in Deal, New Jersey, a town along the Atlantic Ocean shore heavily populated by Syrian Jews.
For years, she commuted to her job in Manhattan on a bus chartered by members of a Syrian synagogue in Deal. Harkov, who now lives in the Israeli town of Modiin, often was the only female and only non-Syrian Jew aboard.
“It’s a very tight community, with strong camaraderie, who marry within and [sponsor] lots of tzeddakah,” she said, using the Hebrew word for charity.
Harkov experienced the community’s insularity and also, in a way, the thoughtfulness it wrought. That occurred when she and her husband moved with their family to Deal in 1993. She met with the rabbi of one Syrian synagogue to ask about it. The man suggested that Deal’s sole Ashkenazi synagogue in a different neighborhood would be more to her liking.
“He said, ‘Oh, you don’t want to live near my shul because you’re not Syrian,’ ” she remembered him saying. The Harkovs bought a house near the Ashkenazi synagogue. “He wanted to save us an uncomfortable feeling,” she said.
Abraham Hamra is among those who spend his summers in Deal. Hamra, a 37-year-old businessman, grew up in the Jewish Quarter of Damascus’s Old City and moved at age 8 to Brooklyn; he now lives about 20 miles from Brooklyn, in the Long Island suburb of Great Neck. Hamra—the namesake of the late Damascus rabbi, his grandfather’s first cousin, who figured in a previous NLI article—recalled Damascus Jews going en masse to synagogue on Shabbat, but said his family sometimes attended services in Jobar, just outside the capital. There, they might enter a cave to light candles in honor of Elijah the Prophet, for whom the Jobar synagogue was named.
Hamra said his family had many friends and acquaintances among their Muslim neighbors. “People somewhat got along,” Hamra said.
But he also spoke of a dark side. Four girls from Damascus’s Jewish community were raped and murdered in 1974 while trying to emigrate to Israel. In Hamra’s lifetime, Palestinians living nearby attacked Jews. And Jews for many years faced official restrictions on property ownership, employment and even traveling more than three miles from town.
The last of the three restrictions was lifted in the period following the girls’ murder, said Hamra, who remembered going to the village of Bloudan for picnics and the coastal city of Latakia on summer excursions.
“People would set up tables and barbecue and also set up a hookah,” he said.
From the distance of three decades and 6,000 miles, Hamra viewed the sudden end of the al-Assad reign—Bashar’s father Hafez ruled with an iron fist from the time he seized power in 1971 until his death in 2000—with mixed feelings.
Bashar “was a horrible, brutal, disgusting dictator” like his father, but the new regime headed by rebel leader Ahmed al-Sharaa “could be even worse [as] religious extremists who are going to wreak havoc,” Hamra said.
“The question is: Is it good for Israel?” he said.
Said Hidary: “I hope [Syria] doesn’t become a Sunni terrorist country that will threaten Israel. It would be nice if it could be pragmatic and recognize Israel.”
“I’m cautiously optimistic about the future, because the rebels are going to need assistance,” Hamra said. “Israel is in a very good position. There’s a level of happiness or relief I’m feeling. I think it’s going to be good for Israel long-term.”
Writer-editor Hillel Kuttler can be reached at hk@HillelTheScribeCommunications.com.
