(+Video) A music teacher's 30 year effort to bring 3,228 Jews out of Syria.

A remarkable life-saving operation..

Raphael Ahren..
Times of Israel..
17 August '12..

Horrified, Judy Feld Carr closely follows the news coming out of Syria, where government troops and rebels are waging a bloody civil war. The former music teacher from Toronto has never been to Syria, yet she has a special connection to the country, and especially to the Jewish community that used to live there.

For nearly three decades, Feld Carr single-handedly arranged the smuggling of more than 3,000 Jews out of Damascus, Aleppo and Qamishli to safety in Israel and America. At the time, the totalitarian Syrian regime didn’t allow Jews to emigrate and tortured those caught trying to escape. But lower officials, she found out, could be bribed into letting Jews leave.

“Oh, my dear,” she says when asked what’s going through her head as she hears the reports from the war zone. “Thank God the Jewish community is out. That’s my first thought. Because if you had a sizable community of 3,000 people, this would be a major problem.”



Feld Carr, who lives in Toronto and has an apartment in Jerusalem, says that both sides in the current war — the troops of President Bashar Assad and the anti-government forces — are committing acts of sheer brutality. “It’s beyond barbaric. There’s nothing to describe it,” she says. “There’s no meaning to each other’s life. And that really scares me. Because if they do it to each other, what would they do to foreign countries, their neighboring countries?”

(Read full "A remarkable life-saving operation")

Originally titled: ‘Thank God, there are almost no Jews in Syria now,’ says the woman who rescued most of them

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How Syria and Lebanon became emptied of Jews

Bataween
Point of No Return
21 August '10

The 2,000 year-old Jewish communities of Syria and Lebanon ( 30,000 and 14,000 in 1948) have always been intertwined, as has the history of the two countries. Here's a timeline tracing their decline to less than 50 Jews in each country today.

19th century: an era of mass migration for Syrians of all faiths, driven by the 1860 Christian-Druze war and economic crises to move to Egypt and the New World.

1909: Young Jews leave to avoid Ottoman conscription law.

1917: exiles from Eretz Israel expose Jews to Zionism.

1918: Syrian and Lebanon under French mandate.

1930s: Anti-Jewish measures introduced, economy in crisis. 2,868 Jews move to Israel.
Nazi propaganda spreads. 5, 286 Jews leave.

1945: 1,000 Jewish children go on aliya.

1945: Riots against Jews of Tripoli, Lebanon. Temporary closure of Alliance Israelite School. End of French mandate.

1945: Syrian school curriculum becomes compulsory.

1947: Partition riots. Great synagogue of Aleppo burnt down. Jews cannot buy property. Hundreds arrested. Jews expelled from university of Beirut.

1949: Jewish bank accounts seized in Syria, property frozen, no freedom of movement.

1949: grenades thrown at al-Menashe synagogue, Damascus: 13 dead, 32 wounded.

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An American Jew in Damascus

Bataween
Point of No Return
24 May '10

(Even though I'm not Jewish, reading this by an American Jew who spent eight months in Syria makes me glad I chose to study the Middle East in Beirut, in Jerusalem, and even in Baghdad. Michael J. Totten)

Awash with conspiracy theories about Zionist power, Syria is not a comfortable place to be a Jew. Any mention of the suffering of Syrian Jews is met with blank stares. But in this fascinating account of his eight months in Damascus, specially written for Point of No Return, this young student of Arabic from Denver, Colorado found empathy from oppressed Kurds and other minorities:

"Most young American Jews that I know have chosen to visit or live in Israel at some point in their lives, not only as a way of familiarizing themselves with Eretz Yisrael or Judaism, but as an introduction to the broader Middle East. I too just finished living in the region for eight months, although my country of choice was not Israel, it was Syria.

"This was a shocking choice for family and friends. Even my Arabic professor, who is an Armenian Christian from Syria, gravely warned me to never mention my religion or any prior travel to Israel, let alone his name in case the secret police are watching me. His admonitions were not at all surprising given his recollections of growing up in Aleppo and on class trips with his school to watch the authorities hang Jews.

"My experiences in Syria, as well as my travel throughout Lebanon, Jordan, and Kurdish Iraq, ranged from the absurdly predictable to the wonderfully unexpected and surprising. My first observation upon arriving in Damascus was how Palestinian flags almost outnumber Syrian flags across the country. At the government subsidized Arabic language center, uncritically profiled by the New York Times, there is a map in every classroom of Palestine (without Israel, although Tel-Abeeb is on the map), some making dubious land claims to Lebanon and Turkey as well, while many teachers teach propaganda to students from all over the world. This can range from learning Palestinian resistance songs to learning about IDF 'massacres' and teaching the students about their perspectives on Zionism. This is done while extolling the Arab armies for their superior ethics in battle, which Judaism does not have, according to my teacher, and their "meticulous" distinctions between Jew, Israeli and Zionist.

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Syrian stories of separation and escape

Rabbi Elie Abadie MD (photo HSJE)

Bataween
Point of No Return
11 March '10

It was one of the largest ethnic cleansings of modern times, yet the media have largely ignored the mass exodus of Jews from Arab lands. The David Project's Forgotten Refugees film has been trying to remedy this state of affairs, with its poignant stories of discrimination, expulsion and escape. In her comprehensive piece for Community Magazine, Our parents, the refugees, Kelly Jemal Massry recounts stories of Jewish refugees that were not included in the film, such as that of Rabbi Elie Abadie, whose parents fled Syria for Lebanon following the riots of 1947.

Rabbi Elie Abadie of the Safra Synagogue is the child of survivors of the 1947 Syrian riots. The mobs—aided by police the Jews had once trusted—began burning synagogues and sifrei Torot in what became known as the harayik. One day, rioters entered the building in which Rabbi Abadie’s parents lived. Within minutes, Mrs. Abadie heard shrieks of terror. “They were beating Jews, destroying their property, looting stores, ruining businesses,” she recalled.

Escape was risky. Syrian police patrolled the border and imprisoned Jews who were caught trying to cross. Some were daring enough to bribe a well-connected official or walk outside the border where no one would see them. But many of these attempts were unsuccessful, and resulted in death, torture or incarceration. Rabbi Abadie’s parents hid in his grandparents’ house, and a few days later they made separate attempts at escape. His mother obtained a doctor’s permit and took her sons to the Lebanon Mountains, but his father was unsuccessful after several attempts to escape Syria.

In one instance, he was caught by a Syrian guard whom he happened to know. The guard said, “The authorities are after you because you’ve tried to escape several times, and I have orders to arrest you. I’m coming back to arrest you tomorrow.”Mr. Abadie understood the hint, and the very next day, with the help of some friends, he boarded the train to Lebanon. A train official with whom he was acquainted hid him in the cargo hold, warning that if he would sneeze or move a muscle they’d both be caught and killed.

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Setting the record straight on the Jews of Syria

Bataween
Point of No Return
02 February '10

Jews left Syria for the Americas, 'not for the embarrassment of Zionism next door'. Muslims 'saved' the Aleppo Codex. 'Riots never happened' against the Jews, but if they did the Israelis inflicted the same oppression on the 'innocent' Palestinians. Taking Syria's sorry treatment of its Jews as an example, Israelinurse bravely tackles some of the myths on the Guardian Comment is Free website where revisionism on the plight of Mizrahi Jews is rife. Read her piece on CiF watch :

"There is, of course, ample information both in print and on-line readily available for those who wish to inform themselves about the experiences of Mizrahi and Sephardi Jews. One useful publication which predates the electronic era is Sir Martin Gilbert’s atlas entitled ‘The Jews of Arab Lands – Their History in Maps’ from 1976, in which one can see at a glance exactly what befell the Jews of Syria, and those in other Arab countries, in stark contrast to the myths propagated above.

"In 1943 the Jewish population of Syria numbered some 29,770, in 1946 it had fallen to 18,000 and in 1974 there remained only 4,000 Jews there. In Kamishliye in June 1967, 57 Jews were murdered by a mob of anti-Jewish rioters. In Aleppo, where Jews had lived since biblical times, predating Islam by many centuries of course, the Great Synagogue was looted and prayer books burnt in the street on November 18th, 1945. On December 2nd, 1947, just days after the adoption of the UNSC resolution to establish the State of Israel, many Jews were killed in anti-Jewish riots; 150 Jewish homes, 50 shops, 18 Synagogues and 5 schools were set ablaze. Some Jews fled to the Yishuv after this incident, including the father of a friend of mine who describes himself as a ‘Halabi’ and recounts his night-time trek down the slopes of the Golan Heights carrying his precious oud. Others fared less well: in November 1950, 30 Syrian Jews were murdered at sea by Arab seamen paid to take them by boat to Israel.

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