The deadline by which all Syrian Jews were to have received permission to leave the country has come and gone, but U.S. officials and Jewish groups are still hopeful that Syrian President Hafez Assad will honor his pledge to grant travel visas to all Jews who want them.
Assad had promised U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher to do so by the end of 1993.
Since then, a reported 350 of Syria’s roughly 1,350 Jews have received travel visas, issued at a rate of 20 to 30 a day.
“We have seen very good progress on that, and the progress is continuing,” State Department spokesman Mike McCurry said in Washington, at the department’s daily briefing Monday.
“We expect that all those who wish to obtain travel documents will obtain them in the days ahead,” he said.
After decades in which travel was extremely limited for the 3,500 Jews then living in Syria, Assad announced a policy of free travel in April 1992.
While more than 2,000 Jews have left the country, most moving to join Brooklyn’s large Syrian Jewish community, Assad sharply reined in the issuing of travel permits beginning in October 1992. Since then, only a handful of Jews have left each work.
Besides the failure to issue travel permits to all Jews who requested them, advocates for Syrian Jews have another concern about the current process.
“There are certain families where one or two children have not yet received” travel documents, in effect keeping the entire family in Syria, and Judy Feld Carr, chair of the National Task Force for Syrian Jews of the Canadian Jewish Congress.
“Assad is certainly stringing out the process,” said Seymour Reich, who heads a similar task force of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations.
“He’s testing the patience of Clinton,” he said, referring to the American president’s upcoming meeting with the Syrian leader.
Reich nonetheless expressed optimism in a statement jointly issued with Alice Harary, chair of the Council for the Rescue of Syrian Jewry.
“We expect that the government of Syria will live up to its promise in the coming days, and we will continue to closely monitor developments,” the statement said.
In the statement, the group welcomed the reports that “several hundred Syrian Jews have received exit permits in recent days.”
But they voiced regret that “the Syrian government did not adhere to its commitment to the Clinton administration that all of the approximately 1,350 Syrian Jews who wished to leave would be processed by Dec. 31, 1993.”
Privately, American Jewish advocates for Syrian Jewry are giving the Syrians a few more days before loudly attacking Assad.
They are mindful of the forthcoming Clinton-Assad meeting, scheduled to take place Jan. 16 in Geneva.
The administration has indicated that the summit, which is seen as a major policy boon for Syria, is not conditioned on the fulfillment of Assad’s promise.
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