From Reuters:
For the first time in three decades, Rabbi Joseph Hamra and his son Henry read from a Torah scroll in a synagogue in the heart of Syria's capital Damascus, carefully passing their thumbs over the handwritten text as if still in awe they were back home.The father and son fled Syria in the 1990s, after then-Syrian president Hafez al-Assad lifted a travel ban on the country's historic Jewish community, which had faced decades of restrictions including on owning property or holding jobs.Virtually all of the few thousand Jews in Syria promptly left, leaving less than 10 in the Syrian capital. Joseph and Henry - just a child at the time - settled in New York.
If you think that Jews were treasured members of Syrian society before Hafez Assad, you would be mistaken.
As this 1825 newspaper article shows, a Reverend W. B. Lewis went to Damascus to try to convert the Jews there to Christianity. His visit was unsuccessful, though - because all the prominent Jews of the city had been put into prison.
Lewis had also reported on the horrendous condition of the Jews of Palestine,
The Jews at Jerusalem, (I speak even of European Jews) are liable to be stopped by the lowest of the country, who, if he pleases, may demand money of them as a right due to the mussulman ; and this extortion may be practised on the same poor Jew over and over again in the space of ten minutes.The Jews are fond of frequenting the tombs of their forefathers, especially on particular days, to read their prayers of remembrance of the dead. Here advantage is taken of them again. They are rudely accosted and pilfered, and if resistance is made, they are beat almost to death, and this not by common highwaymen or Bedouin Arabs, but by men they may have been in the habit of seeing and talking with every day.
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