‘Excited Jews are coming back’: US Jewish group receives warm welcome in Syria

Before he left Syria for the United States in 1992, Henry Hamra worked in the garment trade with a local boy born to a Jewish mother and a Muslim father in Damascus. He got to know the family, but lost touch when he left Syria at the age of 15.

This week, on his first trip back to Syria, Hamra reconnected with his former coworker’s brother while visiting the neighborhood.

“He was hugging me and kissing me and saying, ‘Don’t leave us alone. We want to see you. We want to have a connection with you,'” Hamra said.

The encounter was part of a warm welcome an American Jewish delegation received this week in Damascus, the first visit by US Jews to Syria since the fall of the Assad regime. Hamra and his father, Rabbi Yusuf Hamra, made the trip to reconnect with their Syrian roots and check on the state of Jewish sites. Alongside the positive reception, they found a depleted Jewish community and that most Jewish sites were in disrepair.

The four-day trip was organized by the Syrian Emergency Task Force (SETF), a US-based nonprofit founded in 2011 in response to the civil war and Assad dictatorship. The delegation flew on Qatar Airways from New York to Doha, and from Doha to Damascus.

The delegation of nine included the Hamras, members of SETF, and Rabbi Asher Lopatin, the director of community relations at the Jewish Federation of Greater Ann Arbor, in Michigan. The group visited a former Jewish school, several synagogues, and a Jewish cemetery, as well as non-Jewish sites, Lopatin said.

Lopatin does not have Syrian ancestry and connected to the trip through a Muslim doctor in Detroit he collaborates with on interfaith work. He said the group received “VIP treatment” at the airport and that he walked around the Jewish quarter of Damascus wearing a kippah.

“Kids, adults, the security people, they were excited that Jews are coming back, because what it means to them is that there’s this vision of a new Syria that is unified, and everyone is Syrian,” he said. “Everyone that we met that found out we were Jewish was so excited. It was warm.”

Hamra said the trip was part of a personal journey to reconnect with his birthplace. His “best years” were his childhood in Syria, living in the tight-knit Jewish community, which dissipated after the move to the US.

“The family, the friends, we were together. We were stuck together. The whole community was like one family,” he said. “Then you’re changing a whole country. Especially when you go to America, you get lost in the big city.”

When he was around 20, he began researching the community’s history in Syria, visiting libraries and collecting pictures, antiquities and videos.

He connected with Mouaz Moustafa, the director of SETF, during the war. After a historical synagogue in Jobar was bombed, Hamra contacted a neighborhood resident and asked him to collect items from the synagogue for preservation. The man put the Jewish items in a box, but the government confiscated it, and they remain lost. The man later moved to Turkey and connected Hamra with Moustafa.

After the regime fell, Moustafa invited Hamra to Syria. SETF has connections to the new government and vouched for the group’s safety, Hamra said. Personnel from Syria’s foreign ministry provided security for the group.

He said the new government wanted to facilitate the trip as a peace message.

“I think it’s to show everybody that there is peace between everybody. I think they want to have peace in the region,” Hamra said. “I think that delegation was an open door for everybody.”

The elder Hamra sent a letter to interim Syrian president Ahmad al-Sharaa, congratulating him on the new government and saying that, despite its decades in exile, the Syrian Jewish community “continues to cherish its deep-rooted connection to Syria, its motherland.”

“As we witness the dawn of a new era, we look forward to rebuilding bridges of communication and to actively participating in the reconstruction of our homeland, standing side by side with our fellow Syrians,” the letter said. The group met with Syria’s deputy foreign minister during the trip.

‘Now it’s different, but it’s beautiful’

Hamra and his father went to see what had happened to the Jewish sites in Damascus, including a school where the elder Hamra had taught for decades. Most of the sites had been stripped of Jewish artifacts, although the al-Franj synagogue still has Torah scrolls. In the area of the Jobar synagogue, the group was only able to find a remnant of an arch with a Star of David on it.

“Everything is stolen,” Hamra said. “There’s only a ceiling and a floor. Nothing else.”

Hamra described returning to the al-Franj synagogue, where his father served as rabbi.

“I thought it was bigger than that because I was little and now it’s different, but it’s beautiful,” Hamra said.

Despite their dilapidated state, the Jewish sites had not been repurposed or occupied, Lopatin said, and neighborhood residents still remember Jews walking to the synagogues.

The previous government disinterred bodies at a Jewish cemetery in Jobar to make way for a road, but Hamra was able to locate the gravesites of his grandfather and great-grandfather.

Hamra said seven Jews remained in Damascus — three women and four men. Some are infirm and one is suffering from mental health issues. The group spoke to several by phone but they didn’t want to meet the delegation for reasons that were unclear, Hamra said. They met with the self-appointed leader of the remaining Jews, Bakur Simantov, who has forged ties with the new government, but argued with an official responsible for one of the synagogues over the looted property.

Joe Jajati, a Syrian Jew living in New York and a relative of the Hamras, was visiting Dubai when the group asked him to come to Damascus to try to assemble a minyan, or Jewish prayer quorum of 10. Jajati flew to Beirut, then drove to Damascus to join the trip, although they weren’t able to get together 10 people for a minyan.

Jajati, who visited Syria while it was still controlled by the Assad regime, recalled sitting in a hotel lobby with Lopatin, who was wearing a kippah, when some men approached them.

“These people would come up to him and be like, ‘Hi, can I take a picture with you?’” Jajati said. “I was like, ‘Wow, I didn’t expect that,’ but it was very nice to see.”

Jajati was complimentary of the Assad regime and its protection of Jewish sites before its downfall, but said the country under the new government appears more welcoming of Jews. He noted that there seemed to be more Islamists in Damascus than during his previous visits.

“Before, it was much too political. Here, it was more and more accepting,” he said. “These people, they do feel this type of hope now. They feel like, ‘Now we’re going to be different. Now we’re finally going to be good again. We’re probably going to have peace now. No more war.’ Any normal person would love that, especially after living 15 years in hell.”

Issam Khoury, a Syrian journalist in New York who was exiled by the Assad regime, said the new government was still getting established, facing significant hurdles, and has not made any statements about Syrian Jews.

“However, it has officially called for the return of all Syrians to rebuild their war-torn country, which certainly includes Syrian Jews,” Khoury said. The government is hoping that Syrian Jews will invest in the country and help get sanctions lifted, he said. Many Syrians are aware of past contributions by the community and are “proud of Syrian Jews,” although they were afraid to express positive feelings toward Jews under the Assad regime, he said.

The security situation remains unstable, the country will likely need one or two years to stabilize, and there has been some persecution of minorities, such as the Murshidians, Alawites and Christians, Khoury said.

The country is awaiting a new constitution, with some fearful of an “Islamic system,” but if the constitution has a pluralistic, democratic framework, “this would mean social and political freedom in Syria, and then Jews and other Syrian minorities would feel reassured,” Khoury said.

Al-Sharaa was formerly the leader of the Islamist insurgent group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, which started as a local branch of al-Qaeda.

“I know there are a lot of questions,” Lopatin said of the new government, “but give them a chance.”

Hamra said he hopes the trip will get more Syrian Jews interested in the community’s roots. Syrian Jews came to the US starting more than 100 years ago. The earlier arrivals are less connected to Syria, and knowledgeable about the community’s history there, than those who arrived in the 1990s when the Assad regime lifted travel restrictions on Jews, like Hamra and Jajati.

“I would love a hand just to clean up the shuls, restore everything else,” Hamra said. “It’s a four, five hundred-year-old synagogue, why would I want to see it just fall apart?”

“This is where I prayed. This is where I used to be with my friends. It’s memories. How would you say no? Just throw everything out? It’s hard to let it go.”