When Syria’s Jews All Gone, Persecution Of Them To End

There will be no Jewish residents of either country barred from holding public office, serving in the army, or wielding authority over non-Jews.

Damascus, August 12 – Syria is poised to become a country in which no persecution of Jews takes place, say analysts, once the small number of elderly remaining Jews there disappears.

As the country suffers in the fifth year of a bloody civil war that has claimed more than 200,000 lives and created millions of refugees, the government’s focus on oppression of the dwindling Jewish population there has faltered, a development that experts believe presages the day, not too far in the future, that mistreatment of Jews within Syria will cease entirely once the last aging Jew there dies. An estimated 17 Jews, all elderly, still live in the country of 20 million people, primarily in a facility attached to the last functioning synagogue in Damascus.

“Syria has an ancient Jewish community, with roots as far back as Biblical times,” noted historian Alois Brünner, who has extensive experience with both Jews and Syrians. “Their situation has varied widely with the country’s shifting fortunes, but really only started to decline seriously when the regime’s opposition to Israel became an existential issue for Jews in Syria.” Brünner said that for the last several decades, Assad’s troops – both his and his father’s before him – have protected the few dozen remaining Jews from Palestinians, albeit unevenly, and when the Jewish population there was still in the thousands, official persecution was still the order of the day. That policy, however, will no longer be on the agenda as Syria continues to evolve in coming years once the fewer-than-twenty Jews there live out their remaining time on Earth.

A government spokesman spoke excitedly of that milestone. “This country prides itself on its treatment of Jews, who have been here for many, many centuries,” said Aiwish Aiqud Qillem of the Ministry of Minorities. “The ups and downs of Syrian history have buffeted the Jews along with many other peoples, but that string of unpleasant episodes will cease once and for all, Inshallah, the sooner the better, once they pass away,” he declared.

A similar situation persists in Lebanon, where somewhere between 40 and 100 Jews still live. In both countries, leaders anticipate the complete cessation of domestic persecution of Jews, and even of open discrimination: there will be no Jewish residents of either country barred from holding public office, serving in the army, or wielding authority over non-Jews. Perhaps more importantly, there will be no government-sanctioned rape of Jewish women and girls, which was manifestly not the case in the 1960’s, 70’s, and 80’s.

Qillem assured a reporter that the government would maintain its attitude and policies abroad until similar circumstances become the norm throughout the region.