No Talking

While there were around 100,000 Jews living in Syria at the beginning of the 20th century, many fled in the 1930s and ‘40s, when anti-Jewish sentiment and restricted government policies made life exceedingly difficult. After Israeli independence in 1948, the situation for Syrian Jews deteriorated further, with repressive measures including barring Jews from government service, not allowing them to own telephones or driver’s licenses, freezing bank accounts, and forbidding them to buy property. Initially, Lebanon allowed escaping Syrian Jews free passage through its territory — until the Syrian government began confiscating the passports of Jews. Still, over the next decades, Jews somehow managed to flee, and in 1992, due to international pressure, the Assad regime officially opened Jewish emigration for a short window, during which time most of the remaining Jews emigrated.

By 2011, there were about 250 Jews still living within Syria, yet by 2014, fewer than 50 Jews remained in the area due to increasing violence and war. By the fall of the Assad regime last September, just nine elderly Jews remained. But the recent passing of 92-year-old Hadiya Sattah, a Jewish resident of Damascus, took down the Jewish population by ten percent. And the leader of the remaining eight is Bechor Simantov.

During the Assad regime, he says, not only did the Jews not speak in public, “We didn’t even speak to each other. Everyone was afraid of their own shadow. Even to leave our own neighborhood required permission from the mukhabarat (secret police).”

Now, with only eight Jews remaining in Syria, most of them elderly, Simantov assumes that in a few years, no Jews will be left in Syria at all — the end of a nearly 3,000-year-old legacy.

Simantov was born in Damascus, and while his 11 siblings have all emigrated over the years to Israel and the US, he decided to stay put. Yet for years, he couldn’t officially connect with them.

“Anyone from the outside who tried to connect with Jews could be interrogated by the Syrian security forces. Of course, I couldn’t call my family in Israel in those days.”

Simantov manages some properties in the city, and owns a clothing factory in Damascus’s industrial area and a clothing store not far from “Harat al-Yahud,” the city’s Jewish quarter, where the remaining few Jews live in close proximity. Many of the homes are boarded up, with a sign in Arabic reading, “This property is closed off by the state’s Higher Committee for Jewish Affairs.”

His daily routine begins with a morning coffee and the perusal of the news and social media, followed by a walk to the market to shop and then a game of tennis. He also cooks kosher food daily for an elderly Jewish woman who has no living relatives.

But as the Jewish community has shrunk, it’s not so easy to find kosher food. Simantov, who mostly eats vegetarian dishes, receives packages of meat from siblings in the US at least once a year, via people traveling to Syria. In the past, he would go to the chicken market with a Jewish friend who was shochet, but the man, who can barely walk today, is now too feeble to shecht.

The New Superpower

Before Syria’s civil war in 2011, Simantov and other remaining community members would go on Shabbos for prayers to the Eliyahu Hanavi shul in the once-exclusively Jewish Jobar suburb, about two kilometers away. He says the shul’s Torah scroll was written on klaf of gazelle leather, and the chandeliers, tapestries, and carpets were magnificent. Today, everything is gone, likely stolen by looters.

According to Simantov, there were once more than 20 synagogues in the Jobar neighborhood, but everything was destroyed in the 13 years of civil war, pounded for years by government forces while in the hands of opposition fighters. Only one shul is left standing — the Eliyahu Hanavi synagogue is still recognizable, meaning there is still a floor and a few walls. A marble sign in Arabic at the gate says the structure was first built in 720 BCE, over 2,700 years ago.

“No one knows what happed to all the Jewish books, manuscripts, and artifacts,” Simantov says. “Some of those items are hundreds, if not thousands of years old.”

Simantov says he was shocked when, on a tour of the synagogue and the old neighborhood accompanied by a deputy of new ruler Ahmed al-Sharaa, he saw the ruined state of the holy building. He says he heard the synagogue was damaged, but he didn’t expect to see that most of it had been reduced to a pile of rubble.

Simantov says that Jews around the world have contacted him with offers to help to rebuild the synagogue.

The good news, he says, is that Damascus’s one Jewish cemetery is unharmed and is regularly visited.

Following the fall of the Assad regime, Simantov says that the new government has reached out to Syria’s ex-pat Jews and has allowed them to check on their property. In April, a delegation from the US did indeed fly to Damascus with the new government’s permission.

In his 74 years living in the Syrian capital, Simantov — who knows a bit of Hebrew (although our interview was conducted together with an interpreter) — says that although he’s never been to Eretz Yisrael, as travel there has been illegal for decades, he’s been able to live a Jewish life just across the border. It wasn’t always easy, but now he feels that history has opened an opportunity that never existed before. He says that the new government told him he was allowed to visit the Jewish State (although he hasn’t yet taken them up on it) and is free to communicate with relatives and friends from around the world.

“Neighbors and friends ask me all the time when there will be peace with Israel, as if I have some kind of inside information,” he says. “Today they look at Israelis with a sense of wonder never seen before. Israel has become a superpower, and the Syrian people are ready for peace. I think it could be very soon.”

End or Beginning?

The entire Syrian people suffered under the rule of Hafez al-Assad, and later his son Bashar, from the early 1970s when Hafez came to power. The Alawite minority brutally suppressed any uprising, and other minorities like the Druze and Kurds were routinely discriminated against and even brutalized, but with the outbreak of the civil war in 2011, things rapidly deteriorated.

The authorities became extremely brutal and suppressed the rebels with unconventional means, including chemical weapons, a crime that led the first Trump administration to launch a US airstrike on Syrian Air Force bases.

“The Jews who remained were relatively safe and not targeted by the regime, but the brutal killings and oppression outraged anyone who cares about basic human rights, even our Muslim neighbors,” Simantov says. “It’s really unbelievable how the world let this happen. Hundreds of thousands were murdered, and the whole world stayed silent. True, Assad was ostracized by most of the Western world, and aside from Russia, Iran, and a few other Arab countries, no one maintained real diplomatic relations with him. But no one actually acted to stop the atrocities.”

And then it happened — suddenly, like a flash of light. It was the beginning of Kislev, the month of miracles. Rebel militias quickly took control of key cities — Aleppo, Idlib Province, Hama, and finally even Damascus, the capital. Bashar al-Assad’s plane, loaded with $250 million in gold bars, took off to Moscow, where he was granted asylum on condition of keeping a low profile.

The timing couldn’t have been better. Russia was bogged down in the war in Ukraine, Hezbollah had been severely beaten by Israel, and Iran, though it initially tried to prevent the regime’s collapse, was already too late. Government buildings were looted, key regime figures were executed, and the feared prisons were broken into by angry citizens searching for their loved ones. Some were reunited after decades of separation, while the horrifying scenes from those places shocked both Syrians and the world with the monstrous cruelty of the fallen regime.

Simantov says that the new reality, after the coup and the ousting of former president Bashar al-Assad and Israel’s decimating, at least temporarily, Iran’s nuclear capacity, came quite unexpectedly. “Honestly,” he says, “we didn’t think it could actually happen.”

Yet when it comes to Israel-Syria relations, everything is still up in the air. Although al-Julani has presented a more moderate policy since taking control, Israel remains concerned about internal chaos and danger on its border with Syria. Immediately after the regime change, Israel took control of the buffer zone with Syria and seized the Syrian side of Mount Hermon, and has been credited with major strikes across the country, systematically destroying all brigades and battalions of the previous regime in southern Syria, targeting every air defense system, missile depot, and weapons lab that could threaten Israel.

Given the swiftness and tenacity of Israel’s reprisals, one might expect Syrian anger toward Israel, but Simantov claims it’s the opposite. “On the contrary,” he says. “The people believe that Israel is better than any Arab country. Everyone knows that Israel doesn’t target civilians.”

Still, it’s not like the Syrians are embracing Israel as their savior. On one hand, Syrian citizens appreciate Israel as a powerful force, a nuclear and military superpower that has managed to land a decisive blow on its enemies. But that doesn’t mean they’re pleased with Israeli involvement in Syria’s internal matters, such as support for Druze and Kurds against Turkish forces, and attacks on Syrian military installations. These are sensitive internal issues for Syrian society.

New Realities

When I ask Simantov whether he ever suffered from the actions of his Muslim neighbors, he firmly denies it:

“I’ve always had wonderful neighbors,” he replies. “We’ve always looked out for each other, and now that I’m older, one of the neighbors comes to check on me almost every day to make sure I’m okay. And now, while the attitude toward Israel is complicated, people constantly come to me and ask, ‘When do you think there will be peace with Israel?’ There’s no doubt the Syrian people value Israel’s contribution to the war against evil forces in the region.

“Two years ago,” he continues, “it seemed like Israel was wounded and weak, that Iran had succeeded in choking the Jewish state. But today, after Israel has struck — with the help of Heaven and revealed miracles — all its enemies down hard, everyone understands: Better to be at peace with Israel than at war.”

Simantov says that the new regime’s intentions appear to be peaceful — at least on the surface. What is certain is that al-Julani has enough on his plate, and isn’t interested in the  few elderly remaining Jews under his authority being harmed under his watch.

“People here didn’t really believe it could happen,” says Simantov. “After so many years of oppression and despair, you lose hope in real change. Entire generations of Syrians were used to living under a brutal, elitist, megalomaniacal regime that stripped them of their personal freedom, their ability to lead a normal life, and their happiness. But that’s now history. The Syrian people have earned the right to write their own history in blood.”

No one in Syria really knows what the future will hold, but until the situation stabilizes and enables the practical steps toward a historic process that seems to already be simmering on a low flame, Simantov will continue to do his best preserve the Jewish flame in Damascus.

“I’m sure peace will happen,” he says, “and that 2025 will be a year of peace. I’m looking forward to giving you and your family a personal tour.”

—Rachel Ginsberg contributed to this report.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1070)