Behind the Headlines the Jews of Lebanon

A group of well dressed men, women and children sat on the terrace of a coffee house in Rosh Hanikra, Israel’s border point with Lebanon, enjoying the view of the coastal plain stretching all the way to the gulf of Haifa.

The group, which seemed like typical tourists who visit the scenic border town, chatted in a mixture of Arabic and French, and occasionally in Hebrew. They were indeed tourists, but hardly typical. They came from the north, from Lebanon. Speaking in Arabic and French marked them as Lebanese nationals. But their usage of Hebrew indicated that they were members of the small Jewish community of Lebanon, a miniscule almost non-existent community.

No one knows exactly how many Jews presently reside in Lebanon, after the long and bloody civil war and after the "Peace for Galilee" operation, both of which have left the country in chaos. There are various estimates, but all agree that there are more than several dozen Jews in the entire country, with only six Jewish families remaining in west Beirut. Several other families are believed to reside in east Beirut.

The group sitting on the coffee house terrace in Rosh Hanikra seemed to constitute the bulk of Lebanese Jewry. The group’s members were quite tight-lipped about their lives and the lives of other Jews in Lebanon. They said they came to see Israel, visit relatives and then go back home. They said their life in Lebanon was good, business was good and they would do a lot of thinking before they would decide to immigrate to Israel.

A STEADY DECLINE

Forty years ago there were some 9,000 Jews in Lebanon. About 2,000 Jews emigrated after World War II. The numbers of Jews between the end of the war and now fluctuated, growing for a while as refugees from Syria and Iraq come to Lebanon, and declining again as some of the wealthier Jews left. By 1975, when the civil war broke out, there were between 2,000 and 4,000 Jews in the country.

The civil war caused another sizeable segment of the Jewish community to emigrate, leaving the community without a rabbi and a ritual slaughterer A rabbi often had to be brought in from Italy or Syria, as was a ritual slaughterer. By the end of the civil war in 1976, only some 2000 Jews were left in the country. It was often difficult to hold a minyan. The few remaining Jews who still live in west Beirut are mostly old, poor and sick. The wealthy and the young live in east Beirut.

RELATIONS WITH MOSLEMS AND CHRISTIANS

The paradox of the Jewish condition in Lebanon is that in spite of all the hardships the country has suffered, the Jews reportedly suffered little because of their Jewishness, and relations with both Moslems and Christians were reportedly good.

At the height of the civil war in Lebanon, the Jews of Beirut took shelter in the Magen Avraham Synagogue. The neighborhood in which the synagogue was located was the scene of fierce battles between the PLO and the Phalangists. The rabbi telephoned Premier Rashid Karame to ask for help, which he promised to send. But before government troops arrived, PLO leader Yasir Arafat took the opportunity to make a humanitarian gesture by sending his men with food for the Jews trapped inside the synagogue and to make certain that they were not harmed. However, as the situation in Beirut during the civil war became unbearable many Jews fled to the mountains in the east. When they returned during a period of relative calm, they found that most of their property had been plundered. Emigration continued after the civil war, with Jews leaving for the United States, Latin America, France and Israel. The Lebanese authorities never prevented them from leaving.

SOME OF THE SYNAGOGUES REMAINING

The Magen Avraham Synagogue is located on Wadi Abu Jamil Street, once the center of the Jewish quarter in Beirut, now a predominantly Moslem Shite area. The street is close to the city’s commercial center, near the "Green Line" dividing east and west Beirut, and the scene of frequent exchanges of fire between the PLO and Christian forces. The synagogue was built in 1926, financed by Indian Jews. It is a cream and ochre-colored building, with Stars of David in its two round windows. At the beginning of August, an Israeli shell hit the roof of the synagogue during the heavy bombardment of the city, according to foreign press reports. There are reportedly plans to repair the damage, but it might take quite a while to do so.

There are other synagogues in Bhamdoun, on the Beirut-Damascus highway, and in Sidon. The one in Bhamdoun is described as an exceptionally beautiful synagogue. The terrorists reportedly used it as a fortified position. They ripped up prayer books and prayer shawls. The Torah scrolls had been removed earlier when the Jewish community left the town several years ago.

JEWISH COMMUNITIES DISAPPEARING

Until 1948, some 200 Jews lived in the southern town of Sidon. Then, as Palestinians fled to the area from Israel, most of the local Jewish population either left the country, took to the hills or moved north to Beirut. When Israeli forces captured the town during the "Peace for Galilee" operation, they found one Jewish family, Jamilla Levy, a 52-year-old widow, and her four grown children, living in a spacious apartment overlooking the part of Sidon.

Jewish communities are also disappearing in other parts of Lebanon. There are reportedly very few Jews left, if any, in Tripoli, in northern Lebanon, presently under Syrian control. A Talmudic center was established in Tyre, south of Sidon, nearly 2,000 years ago. But so far as can be established, no Jews are now residing there.

There was a strong Jewish community in the predominantly Druze town of Hasbaya, north of the Israeli town of Metullo. However, most of the Jewish residents moved to the Galilee settlement of Rosh Pina when it was founded at the turn of the century, and by the end of World War I all the Jews had left Hasbaya.

Some 80 Jewish families lived in the Druze-Christian town of Deir el-Kamar on the Shouf mountains at the beginning of the 1800’s. They left in the 1860’s when the Druze-Christian conflict reached its peak. An old synagogue remains in the town.