Washington (AP) – American Jews who fled their Syrian homeland Decades ago, went to the White House this week to call on the Trump administration to raise sanctions against Syria which, according to them, prevent them from restoring some of the The oldest synagogues in the world and rebuild the country’s decimated Jewish community.
For Henry Hamra, who fled Damascus in adolescence with his family in the 1990s, the 30 years that followed were shaded by concern for what they left.
“I was just on the lookout all the time. The old synagogues, the old cemetery, what happens, who dealt with it? said Hamra, whose family settled in New York.
His family fled the Syrian capital to escape the repressive government of Hafez Assad. With the overthrow of his son, Bashar Assad, in December and the end of the Assad family, Hamra, his 77-year-old father, the Rabbi Yusuf Hamra, and a small group of other Jews and non-Jews returned to Syria last month for the first time.
On Wednesday, they informed the officials of the State Department of the Region and managers of the White House. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comments.
They were accompanied by Mouaz Moustafa, executive director of a group called the Syrian emergency working group, who had an influence in the past in the displacement of American officials to sanction the government of Assad for its torture and its institutionalized murders.
With Assad disappeared and the country trying to leave poverty, Moustafa urged American decision -makers to raise radical sanctions that block most investments and commercial transactions in Syria.
“If you want a stable and safe Syria … Even if it is as simple as to rebuild the oldest synagogue in the world, the only person who is able to make this a reality today is, frankly, Donald Trump,” said Moustafa.
The Jewish community of Syria is one of the oldest in the world, dating from its history to the time of the Prophet Elijah in Damascus almost 3000 years ago. It had once been one of the largest in the world and was still estimated at 100,000 at the beginning of the 20th century.
Restrictions, surveillance and increased tensions after the creation of Israel and under the Assad Authoritarian family sent tens of thousands of people fleeing in the 1990s. Today, only seven Jews are known to stay in Damascus, most of them.
What started as a largely peaceful uprising against the Assad family in 2011 has become a vicious civil war, with half a million meters while Russia and the militias supported by Iran are fighting to maintain the assads in power, and the Islamic State group imposing its reign on a large strip in the country.
A military coalition led by the United States has confused the Islamic State by 2019. Successive US administrations have stacked the sanctions against Syria on torture, imprisonment and murder of perceived opponents of the Assad government.
Bashar Assad was ousted in December by a coalition of rebel groups led by an Islamist insurgent, Ahmad al-Sharaa, who today leads what he says is a transitional government. He and his supporters have struggled to protect members from many minority religious groups of Syria and Pacific coexistence Promised As they ask a skeptical international community to raise paralyzing sanctions.
Although incidents in revenge and collective punishment have been much less widespread than expected, many minority communities in Syria – including Kurds, Christians, Druze and members of the Alaouite sect of Assad – are concerned and not convinced by promises of inclusive government.
After decades from outside, the former Christian neighbors of Yusuf Hamra in the old town of Damascus recognized her during his trip last month and stopped to kiss him and share gossip on the old knowledge. The Hamras prayed in the Al-Franj synagogue with long negotiations, where he served as a rabbi.
His son, Henry Hamra, said he was shocked to see tiny children begging in the streets-a result, he said, sanctions.
Visiting the site of what had been the oldest synagogue in all of Syria, in the Damascus Jobar area, Hamra found it in war ruins, with a munition shell still among the rubble.
Hamra had met Moustafa, then an activist of the opposition based in the United States, when he contacted him during the war to see if he could do anything to save precious artefacts inside the Jobar synagogue when the fight was raging around him.
A member of the Moustafa group underwent an injury to the bursts of shells, and a member of a Jobar neighborhood council was killed. The two men were Muslims. Despite their efforts, the fighting later destroyed most of the structure.
Hamra said the Jews abroad wanted to be allowed to help restore their synagogues, their family homes and their schools in the old town in the capital. One day, he says, the Jewish community of Syria could be like that of Morocco, prospering again in a Muslim country.
“My main objective is not to see my Jewish district, my school, and my synagogue and everything are disintegrating,” said Hamra.
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This story has been corrected to reflect that the advocacy group is the Syrian emergency working group, not the American Syrian working group.
