I was just a teenager, but I knew I had to leave Syria. Without a smuggler, could I possibly escape on my own without being caught or shot?

Photos: AP Images

As told to Shira Yehudit Djalilmand by Rabbi Isaac Farhi

I remember my childhood in Aleppo, growing up in a loving family but surrounded by fear. One of my most vivid memories is from 1960, when I was just seven — my brother Dodi burst into the house shouting that our father had been taken to prison. It was illegal for Jews to emigrate from Syria, but as a prominent member of the Aleppo Jewish community, my father often helped prepare documents to help Jews get out, at great personal risk. Now we had no idea if we would see him alive again.

Violence and persecution were nothing new for the Syrian Jews. There was the Aleppo Pogrom in 1947, when the local Arabs, furious about the United Nations’ plan to form a Jewish state in Eretz Yisrael, rioted in the Jewish neighborhoods, burning and beating everything and anyone they found. Seventy-five Jews were murdered that day, hundreds wounded, and synagogues, schools, and stores were burnt to the ground.

B’chasdei Hashem, my father was released after thirty days, weak and malnourished — but alive. Life went on much the same — we were forbidden to leave the country, do business abroad, or hold a driver’s license, and beatings and insults were common. But then in 1965, they caught Israeli spy Eli Cohen.