How Damascene Jews hope to return….. to normalcy

Franklin Lamb

Bab Touma Jewish Quarter, Damascus — Growing up in the small town of
Milwaukie, Oregon and until after graduating from high school, I never
knew or knowingly met a Jew. Not until my first post-high school job as a
swimming instructor and life guard at the Portland Jewish Community
Center, having recently earned an American Red Cross Water Safety
Instructor Certification — something I would recommend to any teenager
today. My plan was to teach swimming and lifeguard over the summer at
the JCC until the fall, when I planned to head to Boston University.

It was a terrific job. I got to swim laps during work when no one was in the
pool, was given free lunches, and learned a lot from the old couple from
Poland who handed out towels and looked after the pool dressing rooms.
We became good friends. When we were first introduced, I noticed that this
inseparable couple walked stooped over, seemed to be in failing health and
had what looked like numbers tattooed in blue ink on their right arms.
I had no idea what the numbers were for and didn’t want to appear nosy
so it wasn’t until a couple of weeks later, during lunch one day, that my new
friends explained what had happened to them and how they came to be
in Oregon. They explained how they had miraculously survived death at a
place they called Auschwitz, a word I don’t recall having ever heard.

>From not having any Jewish friends in high school, in Boston I soon had
mostly Jewish friends and several times was invited for a weekend to
Brooklyn, Long Island, Teaneck, New Jersey and other places in the
metropolitan New York area. For a hayseed kid from a small town in the
Pacific Northwest it was great to have fun and socially  sophisticated
Jewish girlfriends,  until I fell deeply in love with Hanna K,
an observant ultra-orthodox student from a Newton, Massachusetts family.
Hanna, who always covered her head stood out on campus from the
typical Jewish girls from places like the Bronx or Westchester County, NY.
Despite our mutual affection, Hanna explained she could never invite me to
meet her family who lived just 20 minutes from BU because I was not
Jewish and her father was very conservative. Both her parents fled Germany
sometime in the 1930’s. I more or less understood, and she taught me a lot
about Judaism, and I actually studied Hebrew for a while, at Hanna’s
insistence.

Finally I marshaled the courage to visit her father’s real estate investment
office which was just opposite the Boston Common and the historic Arlington Steet church
within walking distance of Boston University Law School. Much like a
nervous a new lawyer appearing before a harsh judge for the first time, I
practiced my lines as I walked along. I still remember the speech I hoped to
deliver, but close to his office I passed the statute of the William Lloyd
Garrison the 19th century editor of the abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator,
and one of the founders of the American Anti-Slavery Society as well as a
prominent voice for the Women’s Suffrage movement. I paused to read
the words inscribed on the stone at the base of his statue, words still clear to
me: “I am in earnest — I will not equivocate — I will not excuse — I will not
retreat a single inch — AND I WILL BE HEARD!” They emboldened and
gave me renewed courage to face Hanna’s father.  

My petition to Hanna’s very stern father, Abraham, was that I deeply loved
his daughter, and that I would try to be for her the best possible husband.
I then made what I hoped would be a case-winning appeal: “And sir, I would
like you to know that by association, by education, by liberal politics, by
philosophy and by choice, I consider myself Jewish and am studying Hebrew
and Jewish religious teachings.” It was true and I was sincere.

As Hanna subsequently told me, her father was not at all liberal in his
politics, was an atheist and he was not in the least impressed with my
presentation. Before rather abruptly showing me the door, he did sort of
mumble that he would consider the matter and inform me of his decision. I
never heard back from the gentleman. Hanna and I remained inseparable
during my last couple of weeks in Boston. But, as happens far too often in life,
one loses contact with the dearest of dear friends. I left for a summer job
in Washington, DC and then England, and I have no idea where life has led
her. To happiness I hope.

During the following years I experienced the intense Zionization among
those in the Jewish community I was involved with while working on the Hill
in Washington. Being known to be pro-Palestinian, I noticed the increased
politicization and polarization among my Jewish friends. Since then, thanks
somewhat to the Internet, this fracturing of the Jewish community has only
increased, with even some progressive liberal friends getting caught up in the
anti-Arab, anti-Islam, neocon-Zionist hate-mongering-nonsense now so
endemic in the US.

Against this backdrop, and after years of living in this region with few
Jews, recent visits to the Jewish community in Damascus has been a joy and
a breadth of fresh air because the ugliness of fascist Zionism and its corrosive
effects on Judaism as a philosophy is absent among Jews here. It’s like the
old days. I have now met more than half of the 30-40 (depending on whose
estimate) Jews remaining in the Bab Toumy Jewish Quarter of Damascus. In
2003, for example, the Jewish population was estimated to be fewer than 100.
In 2005, the US State Department estimated the Jewish population at 80
in its annual International Religious Freedom Report for 2008. In May 2012,
it was reported by the State Department that only 22 Jews still lived in Syria,
all of them elderly and living in Damascus in a building adjoining the city’s
only functioning synagogue. This is not true. The remaining Jews live
scattered around the Jewish Quarter and generally in family homes they
have occupied for many years.

My new, excellent friend Saul, is the last remaining Jewish tailor in Syria.
We spend time discussing just about everything but what I particularly like
about Saul, and Albert Camero, the head of what’s left of the Jewish
community in this battered country, is our discussions of “what went wrong”
from the days when Jews and non-Sunnis like Twelver Shiites, Alawites,
various Christian denominations, Druze and other heterodox communities
lived together in Syria, nearly as family.