In Damascus again after a hiatus of nearly eight years, I decided to see what remained of the city’s once flourishing Jewish community. The dictator was gone. The new Islamist rulers had yet to fully stamp their authority on the city and the country. It seemed an ideal time.
The Jewish Quarter of Damascus is located in the old city. There were 50,000 Jews in Syria at the beginning of the 20th century – an ancient and historic community dating to antiquity.
The Jews of Syria were divided by city origin, with two old communities – Damascus and Aleppo – maintaining a rivalry. A third, newer community had been established later in Qamishli, in the Kurdish-majority northeast.
The Jewish community was further subdivided into descendants of Sephardim who arrived after 1492, Jews of Italian descent, Kurdish Jews, and “Musta’arabin” (Arabized) or Mizrahi Jews, whose families never left the Levant.
Of these, the Jews of Aleppo and Qamishli have departed in their entirety. The seven or eight elderly Jewish residents of Damascus are the last remnant. (The exact number is disputed).
My friend Firas and I set out from Bab Touma one Saturday morning to see what we could find. Firas is a Syrian Kurd, a former YPG (People’s Defense Units) fighter, and a former resident of Damascus.
I had read that one of the three synagogues of the neighborhood, the Elfrange, still had services. I had the vague idea that I might arrive for the Saturday morning prayers and make the acquaintance of whomever I might find there.
It took us a while to find the entrance to the synagogue. When we did, the door was padlocked. No one was around. We asked a neighboring shop owner what he knew about the “Jewish synagogue.”
“Abu Ibrahim has the keys,” he replied. “He runs a school here. But he isn’t here today. Give me your phone number and I’ll pass it on to him.” We did so without much hope.
“Do you know where we could find any of the Jews still living in the city?” I asked
The shop owner considered for a moment. “There’s an old woman living close by. But she’s lost her mind and can’t tell you much. Then there’s another old woman, two doors down from here. You see that black iron door? That’s where she lives. I think she’s there now. Go and knock and maybe she’ll answer.” So we did. No answer again.
Dejected, and with a growing sense of absurdity, we wandered past the dilapidated houses, asking various passersby for clues. “There’s a Jewish man living in that street right there,” a woman told us, pointing to a street on the left. “His name’s Ibrahim.”
We went down the small, dusty street and asked the owner of a small hummus restaurant whether he knew which house was Ibrahim’s. Our question caused an argument between the young man and his friend who was with him. “Don’t know,” the friend told us. “No idea. Don’t know.”
Damascus is a city of deep suspicions, covered by a layer of slightly too-sweet politeness. But in this case, the young hummus restaurant owner took pity on us, and pointed to a ramshackle house opposite. “He’s there. He lives there alone. But he might not answer.”
“He doesn’t want to speak to anyone,” his friend added.
WE WENT over and Firas hammered on the door. Once. Twice. And then, more or less despairingly, a third time. As we were about to leave, a small, elderly man appeared on the balcony facing the street.
Firas shouted that I was a Jewish journalist who had come to find out about the Jews of Damascus. After a long pause, the old man pulled a string on the balcony that was attached to the front door and it clicked open.
Inside, we found everything in an astonishing state of dereliction. Old bicycles, clocks, and ornaments, and rotting carpets and packing cases were all piled up in the courtyard and the adjoining rooms.
This had very obviously once been a house owned by a wealthy family. Nothing remained of that. The old man motioned to us to come upstairs. We sat with him next to the balcony.
While speaking Damascus Arabic, laced with Hebrew words here and there, he produced a phone with a Channel 11 report on the Jews of Damascus on it. He motioned to me to read the Hebrew. I did so and, satisfied, he began to tell us about himself and his family, the Hilwanis of Damascus.
His name is Fuad Hilwani. Most of the family had left in 1992, he said, when Hafez Assad chose to allow the remaining 4,000 Jews in Syria to depart. He described the severely curtailed lives they had lived up to that point, under the pervasive surveillance of the regime’s intelligence branches.
Jews needed permission even to leave the neighborhood. He had stayed to look after his ailing mother, who died a few years later. He had a brother in New York, and one in Israel.
I congratulated him on his family’s house, saying it must have been illustrious at one time. He gave me a searching look, as though suspecting me of mockery. Then he said: “This wasn’t our house. It belonged to the Totah family. I’m just watching it so that Abu Ibrahim and those behind him don’t come and take it.”
Then he launched into a complicated account of efforts by a power structure connected to the old regime to move in on remaining Jewish properties in the city. He then mentioned a general connected to Maher Assad’s notorious 4th Division, a by-word for criminality and cruelty under the Assads. (Maher is former president Bashar al-Assad’s younger brother.)
There had been violence and intimidation, and even an act of murder. I haven’t been able to fully verify these claims, so I won’t repeat them. At the end of this, Hilwani offered to read our fortunes, and following this bade us goodbye. “Shabbat Shalom,” he wished me, as we stood on the stairs.
Back at my hotel in Bab Touma, I searched for anything I could find on the Totah family and their properties in the Jewish Quarter. On a site that collects memories of the vanished Jewish communities of the Arab world, I found the following description:
“The Beit Tuta (also known as Beit Totah) was an opulent Damascene courtyard house owned by the Tuta family from the mid-19th to early 20th century. It boasted both traditional, open-air reception rooms and Western-style reception rooms.”
I thought of the junk piled high in the courtyard and the rooms around it, and the old Jewish man, alone, its curious sentinel.
THERE WAS still one synagogue I wanted to see – the Eliyahu Hanavi, in the neighborhood of Jobar, a couple of kilometers from the old city. It is described by the 13th-century Jewish traveler Samuel ben Samson as a “beautiful synagogue situated outside the city” and by Israel Joseph Benjamin in 1864 as “supported by 13 marble pillars, six on the right and seven on the left side, and everywhere inlaid with marble.”
However, the synagogue was destroyed in 2014 during the Syrian civil war by a regime artillery shell. We found a local Jobar man to take us there, but there wasn’t much to see except rubble. Part of a single wall is still standing. I had heard that the area where the synagogue had stood was mined, but our guide immediately clambered up on it, so we followed suit.
I saw that there was an UNRWA school close by, and I remembered that the Assad regime had a practice of housing Palestinian refugees close to traditionally Jewish areas of Damascus.
After a couple of minutes, we had company. A motorcycle roared up. Two young men, both in black, one with a long black beard, the other wearing a leather jacket, climbed off. Representatives of the new regime. They climbed up to the highest point of the rubble that once was the Jobar synagogue and called us to join them. Out of breath, we did so.
“You can’t film there,” the bearded young man told us matter-of-factly. “And no photos. This is a Jewish religious site. And of course, we respect all religions.”
“Who are you?” asked Firas, though it was obvious. “We’re from the ‘organization’ [haya in Arabic, referring to Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham],” the bearded young man replied. “And if you want to photograph, you should go to the Air Force Intelligence building at the Abbasin Circle, and get permission.”
It wasn’t quite clear why having respect for all religions involved forbidding photography of a ruined synagogue. But we didn’t contest the point.
After escorting us about 45 meters from the ruin, the two climbed back on their motorcycle and roared off through the dust.
So that was the “mukhabarat” (secret police) of the new regime, it occurred to me. Still learning the trade. The old lot would have checked my camera to see if I had already taken some pictures. They would learn quickly, no doubt.
Fuad Hilwani had scoffed at my question whether he thought that the fall of Assad would change anything. Abu Ibrahim, he had said, would make a deal with the new regime, that was all. Fifty-fifty (i.e., of mutual benefit – to the new regime and to Abu Ibrahim).
Seven old Jews, a locked synagogue, and a ruin. That’s what remains of the Jewish community of Syria.