The Untold Story of Syria’s Jews:decades of Secret U.S. Jewish Aid Preceded the Exodus of Syrian Jew

With the completed emigration of Syrian Jewry this week, the book has been all but closed on a Jewish community that traced its history back more than 2,000 years.

The publicized arrival of Syrian Chief Rabbi Avraham Hamra in Israel has lifted the curtain on an operation that has quietly brought 3,800 Jews out of Syria since President Hafez Assad permitted free emigration in 1992.

Hamra’s arrival has also permitted publication, for the first time, of the 46-year history of how the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee secretly helped Jews in Damascus, Aleppo and elsewhere in Syria with money it received from the United Jewish Appeal.

An estimated 230 Jews have chosen to remain in Syria, the remnants of a community which was thriving by the time of Ezra the scribe, and continued through the rise and fall of Roman, Byzantine and varous Muslim empires and rulers.

Without question, its harshest period came in the past half-century, as Syria, ruled by a succession of military dictators, became the standard-bearer in the war against the State of Israel.

The devastating December 1947 riots against Aleppo Jews, which destroyed synagogues and left many Jewish families penniless, led 6,000 of its 10,000 Jews to flee in a clandestine emigration that continued until the government cracked down in 1951.

From then on the Jewish community was subject to the scrutiny of the Mukhabarat secret police, varying degrees of restrictions on travel and trade, discrimination in employment and studies, and arbitrary jailings.

The Jews were allowed, however, to continue their religious life. Synagogues and schools remained open, and the Jewish children of Syria learned Hebrew as proficiently as their cousins in Brooklyn, home to a large Syrian Jewish community.

But at the core of Syria’s policies toward its Jews was a fierce opposition to emigration.

“If we let them go, they will go to Israel. They will marry, have children, and 20 years from now their children will be fighting our boys,” is how a Syrian Foreign Ministry official explained the policy at one point to Stephen Shalom. Shalom is the son of a Syrian emigre to Brooklyn who in recent years traveled to Syria to aid the Jewish community there.

Despite the ban, most Syrian Jews desired to leave, and throughout the years, Jews tried to cross the border. Some succeeded; others were arrested and tortured.

FIRST LEGAL DEPARTURES TOOK PLACE IN 1977

It was not until 1977 that the first legal and public departures took place.

Following public intervention from then-Rep. Stephen Solarz (D-N.Y.) and President Jimmy Carter, Assad allowed the release of 14 unmarried women. They were part of a group of 400 young women who could not be married because of the hundreds of young men who had sneaked out of the country.

Following this first group, in a quiet exodus that is being publicized only now for the first time, two or three women departed each month, until more than 350 had left.

In the 1980s, Assad eased travel restrictions somewhat, and some Jews emigrated. But with exit visas not being given to complete families, the community remained trapped in Syria.

“I always saw them as pawns the Syrians were using” in their dealings with Israel, Shalom said in an interview this week.

It was his father, Isaac Shalom, who first approached the JDC on behalf of the New York based Near East Jewish Aid Society in 1947, asking for emergency relief in the wake of the Aleppo riots.

This led to an aid channel which was to continue for 30 years: The JDC allocated money to the Aid Society, which wired the funds to bank accounts in Beirut or Damascus.

From there, the money was allocated for education, health and relief by trusted members of Syria’s three Jewish communities: Damascus, Aleppo and Kamichli. Damascus was the largest of the three; Aleppo the oldest; and Kamichli, a town on the Turkish border, where a few hundred Jews originally from Kurdistan led the most precarious existence.

This method of aid was to continue until 1977, when JDC representatives were finally able to travel officially to Syria to allocate aid to the Jewish community.

By the time the JDC was able to end its assistance last year, its aid had totaled more than $10 million.

The JDC is financed by the United Jewish Appeal, which raises funds through local federations.

But with the exception of the leadership of the JDC and a few other Jewish organizations, this aid was kept secret.

The JDC archives show that the failure of Syrian Jewry to reach the public communal agenda reflected a deliberate policy decision.

‘PUBLICITY WOULD WORSEN THEIR PLIGHT’

“It is fair to say that publicity focused on this community would worsen rather than help their plight,” is how one JDC official reassured a Springfield, Mass, rabbi who had written his local federation in 1964 asking why Jewish newspapers were not carrying stories about Syrian Jewry.

If most American Jews did not know they were quietly helping the Jews in Syria, it is also fair to say that — until the 1970s — the JDC knew less than it would have liked about the state of the Syrian Jewish community.

The JDC files on Syrian Jewry reveal the amazing isolation of Syria and its Jews from the Western world for nearly 30 years.

It was an isolation, imposed by a succession of Syrian military dictatorships and by the fears of Syrian Jews, which made American Jewish aid to the community for many years more a matter of good intentions and guesswork than planning and philanthropic oversight.

As the Syrian Jewish community was shaken by the emerging conflict between Syria and Israel, news of riots and arrests reached the JDC only after long delay.

The organization depended on second-hand reports from American diplomats in Beirut to learn that 120 Jewish families had lost everything in the Aleppo riots.

It also learned many months later, from a letter forwarded by Isaac Shalom, that Syria had greeted the birth of the State of Israel by arresting several hundred Jews, closing their businesses and leaving 600 families penniless.

In 1949, the JDC received first-hand reports from two non-Jewish Americans — one a diplomat, the other a Christian missionary — of the distress of Syrian Jews.

Their reports led the JDC to approve a monthly allocation to the Near East Jewish Aid Society which was to remain, for decades, at about $10,000 per month.

If the situation had grimly stabilized around 1951, when emigration became almost impossible for most, it grew worse in 1956, as tensions in the Middle East hightened, eventually leading to war between Israel and Egypt that October.

All the Jewish homes in Kamichli were marked with red at one point that spring, and although the marks were soon removed — apparently at the order of other, higher-up officials — the implied threat of a pogrom was clear enough.

In Damascus, five teachers in the Jewish school were arrested.

“We are suffering so deeply that nobody outside of Syria can imagine what we are suffering actually,” wrote members of the community in a July 1956 letter to Isaac Shalom, signed only “Aleppo’s Jews.”