The last Damascene synagogue

Written by Editors Thursday, 02 July 2009 13:14

Ed Ballard met some of the last of Syria's once-thriving Jewish Community when he was studying Arabic in Damascus

After a little time spent wandering the old town of Damascus, you notice something strange: none of the homes have ground-floor windows. Here, where family privacy is sacrosanct, homes are built around a bright central courtyard instead of taking light from windows onto the street. So walking around the city’s innumerable ancient alleyways is tantalising, the metal front doors giving nothing away—any could hide an Ottoman palace or a house in utmost disrepair.

The door we’re are standing outside this Saturday morning – Niels with his camera slung low and intimidating around his neck, me with my Arabic phrasebook – looks unexceptional. Black-painted metal set in ageing plaster, litter around the doorstep, mangy cats in the alleyway. But we’ve been told that it’s the entrance to the last working synagogue in Damascus.

Syria’s capital (perhaps the oldest continuously-inhabited city in the world) has been home to a flourishing Jewish community at least since Roman times, when the city was home to 10,000 Jews.

The “street called straight” described in Acts – where a Jew named Saul was cured of his blindness and the scales fell from his eyes – is still the spine of the old city. It’s bordered by souvenir shops and massive chunks of Roman masonry – all that remains of a mile-long colonnade. A few blocks away you can still visit the chapel where Saul, now St Paul, hid from persecution, and the spot on the city wall where he was lowered to freedom in a basket. Despite the six-lane highway that runs along the wall, and the nightclub that neighbours St Paul’s chapel, history and legend seem to linger in the city’s stones.

But nowadays there are fewer than a hundred Jews left in all of Syria. In a short generation this ancient community will die out, and a part of the city’s living history will die with it.

The Jewish community of Syria had been slowly dwindling centuries before the creation of Israel in 1948, most of them leaving for Western Europe in search of better jobs. But the loss of Palestine incited anti-Jewish violence among Syrians which – along with the promise of a better life in the new Jewish homeland – led thousands of Jews to flee. This exodus continued inexorably – but slowly, since emigration to Israel was forbidden under Syrian law. Those who stayed faced strict supervision by the secret police and legal restrictions to their freedom to move, to own property, to have their own schools.

Ironically, the thing that ended the Syrian Jews’ persecution delivered the death-blow to their community. It came in 1992, when the Syrian government finally caved in to American political pressure, and allowed its Jewish citizens to emigrate freely once again. Immediately the overwhelming majority left for Israel or America, never to return. Most synagogues closed, some of which had survived for over a millennium. Nowadays the largest population of Syrian Jews - around 40,000 - is in New York.

Niels was a Danish photography student looking for a beleaguered minority to photograph for his degree. His first choice had been the transsexuals of Iran, where gay men (officially a nonexistent group) are encouraged to undergo genital reconstructive surgery. But Tehran had not obliged him with a visa. Turned away at the border, he took a train south to Syria, whose declining Jewish community he had read about. Their plight, he thought, might be picturesque. I met him in a youth hostel and agreed to help him look.

We hadn't any leads, so we adopted a blasé approach, heading to the district of the old city that maps and guidebooks still call the Jewish quarter, and asking friendly-looking people in broken Arabic where all the Jews were. Most shrugged or feigned incomprehension - thanks to my scanty vocab, they probably didn't have to feign all that hard. Some told us there had been no Jews in Syria for many years.

A giggling group of schoolboys were the first to help us out: they led us to a building which still bore a sign proclaiming it to be a Jewish school. But the windows were smashed and boarded up, and the building was abandoned. Someone had spray-painted a Star of David on the door.

Eventually we ran into “Christopher”, an old Damascene with blue eyes and black teeth who made his living from renting rooms to foreigners. After a few tips on how to identify Jews (“the voice, that is one sign … if they speak Hebrew, they are Jewish. If they do not, they are not. And the names … they have names very special also”) he told us where to find a Muslim convert from Judaism. His name was George Dabdoub and he owned a shop in the tourist souk near the Umayyad Mosque, the third holiest site in Islam and the heart of the old city.

Dabdoub Antiques is one of the fanciest of the tourist shops in Damascus—a city where many trinket shops vie with each other to conjure the most enticing Aladdin’s Cave atmosphere. He sold antique carpets and silverware and expensive backgammon sets, and we found him sitting amongst his wares smoking a sheesha. If he was surprised by why we were there, he didn’t show it. Perhaps we weren’t the first students to chance upon him on this particular quest. He told us in a matter of fact way why he converted (business was good in Syria, but there were no Jewish women to marry) and told us where to find the synagogue—next to a liquor store in the old Jewish quarter, opposite the hotel Talisman. We should go on Saturday morning and ask for Albert Caméo. He gave us a business card: “President of the Jewish community Damascus – Aleppo”, it said in silver writing. “There will be someone from Mukhabarat there, but Caméo will let you in”.

Outside the Talisman hotel – one of Damascus’ newly thriving boutique hotels, whose luxury swimming pool required the ripping-up of the entire ground floor of a no doubt sumptuously-paved Ottoman courtyard – stands a secret policeman. He looks so nondescript he passes out the other side into conspicuousness. Who else but a secret policeman would wear a grey tie and grey socks with his grey suit? At least we know we’ve come to the right place. There’s no sign of anyone else. I approach him and tell him in my halting Arabic that we’re only tourists and we’ve come to look at the “kenisa yehudiya” (Jewish Church; I didn’t know the word for synagogue.) He stares balefully and shakes his head. Niels looks at me witheringly; I was supposed to beguile the guard with some banter in his native tongue. I feel stumped.

They’re praying, he tells me. Defeated all too easily, we stand around in the forlorn hope that he’ll disappear.

A few moments pass before a tiny old man emerges from a corner at the far end of the alleyway, and ambles slowly towards us. In his baggy Borat-ish beige suit he looks like any old Syrian gentleman. He wears thick glasses and is almost totally bald. Perhaps he is a Jew, I think hopefully, listening absurdly for some telltale Hebrew chatter—but that hope dwindles: he is obviously a friend of the secret policeman. They embrace warmly and talk, too rapidly for me to follow, glancing in our direction. When they finish I duly repeat my tourism spiel, and show him the card Dabdoub gave me. Clearly baffled, but smiling, he tells us that he is Albert Caméo, and we’re welcome to come in. As we follow him inside I rethink the role of the guard: not a hostile intruder into an ageing, helpless community, but a friendly lookout. Things have changed; or perhaps the Jews are just too old now, too obviously harmless, to provoke any hostility from their neighbours.

God doesn’t leave you alone in Syria. Religious buildings are lit garishly by striplights: green for mosques, blue for churches. The call to prayer, to travellers of centuries past a symbol of the exotic East – the Orient, perhaps – is now amplified by loudspeakers, which rouse the faithful through a blanket of static. Tiny religious icons cluster street corners in the Christian Quarter. The kitschiest are holographic: from one angle Jesus is dying on the cross, from another he’s resplendent in heaven.

The quiet synagogue, which we enter through a leafy courtyard, feels different. It’s a graceful building, airy and quiet, and lit only by tall windows. The ceiling is ancient cedar painted sky blue, and chandeliers sway from it in the breeze of a slow fan. Although I’ve only been inside a synagogue once in my life, and that one occasion I barely remember, this place seems familiar: like the English churches I’m used to, it bears the sad weight of a tradition in decline.

There is seating for more than a hundred, in pews and a gallery up above. And until quite recently this was just one synagogue of seven in Damascus. Today eight people are present: eight old men, the heirs to an ancient tradition, sitting among the relics of a fading community.

One of Caméo’s friends offers us both a yarmulke. I tell him we’re not Jewish, prompting a commiserating smile. Becoming briefly proprietorial, the congregation show us the treasures of their community, which have collected here as synagogue after synagogue was closed. An ark contains many Torah scrolls, and behind it stands a menorah—made of gold, they say. The door we entered by is a huge heavy block of cedar, austere on the outside but on the inside painted pale green and carved beautifully with leaves and flowers. Nobody knows how old it is: hundreds of years, in any case.

After a while we’re motioned to a pew by the wall, and the service begins. In the absence of a rabbi (one comes down from Turkey every month or so to bless their food) the old men take turns to shuffle up to the bimah and recite from the Torah.

Afterwards the men begin chatting amiably, pointing at Niels as he wandered the synagogue with his camera. They encourage him to take photos of their synagogue but don’t seem keen on portraits, to his obvious frustration.

“Bring us Jewish girls from America,” somebody tells us in English. We all laugh, but he’s only half joking. None of the tiny congregation have children here; the young all left for Israel or America as soon as they could.

Eventually the old men being to shuffle away; it’s time to leave. As the door opens I hear the resumption of a familiar sound, something dimly audible in many an otherwise silent Old Town alleyway. It’s the din of pneumatic drills and the shouts of the workmen who are slowly working their way along Straight Street, from the Eastern Gate to Saladin’s medieval citadel, laying clean new paving and renovating ageing storefronts. In an effort to enhance the city’s charm and attract ever more tourists, the city is being cleaned. But the violent changes which have convulsed Syria over the last few decades – of which the end of the Jewish community is just one effect – are not so easily effaced.

I ask Caméo why he stayed. He shrugs again, as if to say he had no choice. These people are Arabs, not Zionists, and Israel is a foreign country to them. “Syria is our home”, he says.

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