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DAMASCUS: Syria’s tiny Jewish community and Syrian Jews abroad are trying to build bridges after Bashar Assad’s ouster in the hope of reviving their ancient heritage before the community dies out.
This week, a small number of Jews living in Damascus, along with others from abroad, held a group prayer for the first time in more than three decades, in the Faranj synagogue in Damascus’s Old City.
“There were nine of us Jews (in Syria). Two died recently,” community leader Bakhour Chamntoub told AFP in his home in the Old City’s Jewish quarter.
“I’m the youngest. The rest are elderly people who stay in their homes,” the tailor in his sixties added in a thick Damascus accent.
After Islamist-led rebels finally toppled Assad in December last year after nearly 14 years of conflict, the country’s dwindling community has recently welcomed back several Syrian Jews who had emigrated.
Syria’s millennia-old Jewish community was permitted to practice their faith under Assad’s father, Hafez, and had friendly relations with their fellow countrymen.
But the strongman restricted their movement and prevented them from traveling abroad until 1992. After that, their numbers plummeted from around 5,000 to just a handful of individuals, headed by Chamntoub, who oversees their affairs.
AFP correspondents met with Chamntoub, known to neighbors and friends as “Eid,” after he returned from burying an elderly Jewish woman.
“Now there are seven of us,” he said, adding that a Palestinian neighbor had looked after the woman during her final days.

The 1967 Arab-Israeli war cast a heavy cloud over the Jewish communities in several Arab countries.
Syria lost most of the strategic Golan Heights to Israel, which later annexed them in a move never recognized by the international community as a whole.
Chamntoub said the community did not experience any “harassment” under Bashar Assad’s rule.
He said an official from the new Islamist-led administration had visited him and assured him the community and its properties would not be harmed.
Chamntoub expressed hope of expanding ties between the remaining Jews in Syria and the thousands living abroad to revive their shared heritage and restore places of worship and other properties.
On his Facebook page, he publishes news about the community — usually death notices — as well as images of the Jewish quarter and synagogues in Damascus.
He says nostalgic Syrian Jews abroad often make comments, recalling the district and its surroundings.
At the Faranj synagogue, Syrian-American Rabbi Yusuf Hamra, 77, led what he said was the first group prayer in decades.
“I was the last rabbi to leave Syria,” he said, adding that he had lived in the United States for more than 30 years.
“We love this country,” said Hamra, who arrived days earlier on his first visit since emigrating.
“The day I left Syria with my family, I felt I was a tree that had been uprooted,” he said.

His son Henry, traveling with him, said he was happy to be in the synagogue.
“This synagogue was the home for all Jews — it was the first stop for Jews abroad when they would visit Syria,” the 47-year-old said.
When war erupted in Syria in 2011 with Assad’s brutal suppression of anti-government protests, synagogues shuttered and the number of Jews visiting plummeted.
In the now devastated Damascus suburb of Jobar, a historic synagogue that once drew pilgrims from around the world was ransacked and looted, with a Torah scroll believed to be one of the world’s oldest among the items stolen.
Chamntoub said his joy at publicly worshipping in the Faranj synagogue again was “indescribable.”
He expressed hope that “Jews will return to their neighborhood and their people” in Syria, saying: “I need Jews with me in the neighborhood.”
Hamra said that like many emigrants, he was hesitant about returning permanently.
“My freedom is one thing, my family ties are another,” he said, noting that many in the 100,000-strong diaspora were long established in the West and reluctant to give up their lives and lifestyles there.
Chamntoub said many Jews had told him they regretted leaving Syria but that he doesn’t expect “a full return.”
“Maybe they will come for trips or to do business” but not to stay, he said.
He expressed hope of establishing a museum in Syria to commemorate its Jewish community.
“If they don’t return or get married and have children here, we will end soon,” he said.

WASHINGTON: The top official in charge of carrying out President Donald Trump’s mass deportations agenda has been reassigned amid concerns that the deportation effort isn’t moving fast enough.
Homeland Security spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement Friday that Caleb Vitello, the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, was “no longer in an administrative role, but is instead overseeing all field and enforcement operations: finding, arresting, and deporting illegal aliens, which is a major priority of the President and Secretary (Kristi) Noem.”
The statement made no mention of why Vitello, a career ICE official with more than two decades on the job, was reassigned or who his replacement will be. But White House officials have expressed frustration with the pace of deportations of people in the country illegally.
The decision comes a little over one month into the new administration, showing how important immigration and carrying out mass deportations are to the Trump administration.
ICE — specifically, its Enforcement and Removal Operations arm — is the key agency tasked with carrying out the Republican president’s pledge of mass deportations of people in the country illegally during his second term.
Last week Tom Homan, the White House border czar tasked with carrying out Trump’s immigration agenda across the federal government, said arrests inside the US — as opposed to people arrested as they’re crossing the border — are about three times higher than they were this time last year, under President Joe Biden. But he said it still wasn’t enough.
“I’m not satisfied,” Homan said. “We got to get more.”
At the time, Homan also said he had talked to ICE leadership about the number of people who had been released from immigration custody. From now on, he said, no one would be released without ICE leadership signing off.
“The number of releases was unacceptable,” Homan said, “and that’s been fixed.”
Homan spoke the same day that two top immigration enforcement officials were reassigned.
Vitello is a career ICE official, who most recently was the assistant director for firearms and tactical programs before being tapped as the acting director.
He’s also served on the National Security Council and held positions at ICE directly related to the agency’s enforcement operations.
ICE has not had a Senate-confirmed leader in years.