Groups Contest Claim by Syria That Jews Don’t Want to Leave

Responding to American complaints that it is no longer permitting Syrian Jews to travel freely, Damascus has asserted that the 1,400 Jews remaining there no longer seek to leave the country.

The Syrian claim was quickly refuted by Jewish organizations here, who last month went public with their charges that Syria had reneged on its promise to allow Jews to travel freely.

That free travel policy, announced in the spring of 1992, reversed a decades-old policy in which the roughly 3,500 Jews of Syria were barred from leaving the country in family groups.

But between last October and January 1993, not a single Jew remaining in Syria was granted travel visas. And in recent months, only a handful of Jews have been given exit papers each week.

Last month, 73 U.S. senators signed a letter urging President Clinton to “press Syria to honor its commitment to allow Jews the right to travel freely.”

It was in apparent response to this that the official Syrian newspaper Tishreen blamed the travel slowdown on the problems faced by Syrian Jews who have arrived in the United States, Canada and Venezuela.

The article in Tishreen, as translated and reported by the Reuter news agency, claimed that “there has been no alteration in travel procedures.”

“The Jewish migrants were badly frustrated because they did not find work in the United States. Some who had practiced medicine in Damascus for dozens of years found their credentials were not accepted and were not allowed to practice, the Tishreen article continued.

But Jewish groups say that the Syrians are raising a false issue in discussing the experiences of Jews who have left the country.

“It’s a straw man,” said Gilbert Kahn, executive director of the Council for the Rescue of Syrian Jews.

ATTEMPT TO ‘DECEIVE THE WORLD’

Alice Sardell Harary, the president of that group, expressed confidence that “all the Jews in Syria would avail themselves of the opportunity to be reunited with their brothers and sisters in the United States,” if Syria resumed issuing travel permits.

“The fact remains that Jews seeking to travel abroad are not permitted to do so as family groups, in violation of the pledge by President (Hafez) Assad to American administration. That is the only reason why Jews are not leaving,” said Seymour Reich.

Reich heads the National Task Force on Syrian Jewry, which is convened by the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations with the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council.

“We call on Syria to lift the rule that bars family groups from leaving and thus end the separation of husbands and wives, parents and children, brothers and sisters, whom the government policy has cruelly kept apart,” Reich said in a statement.

Rep. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), chairman of the Congressional Caucus for Syrian Jewry, said, “This blatant lie is just one more attempt by Assad to deceive the world into thinking that Syria has changed its ways.”

Schumer, whose district includes the Brooklyn neighborhoods where many Syrian Jews have settled, said Assad’s “cynical attempt to play a carrot and stick game with Jewish lives is not going to convince the U.S. of his good intentions.”