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Abstract
Syrian President Ahmad al-Shar’a traveled to New York to address the United Nations General Assembly. On Sunday evening, September 22, 2025, he held a meeting with Syrians residing in the United States. In the first row, eleven Jewish Syrians took their seats, a number of them wearing traditional skullcaps. One member of the Jewish delegation, Joe Jajati, had led a trip of Jewish personalities to visit Damascus and its Jewish sites just a few days before this encounter in New York.
In February 2025, a group of Jews from the United States flew to Damascus and visited Jewish sites in the Syrian capital. The delegation was led by Rabbi Yusuf Hamra, who had left his home in Damascus thirty-three years earlier. Almost all the Jews had left Syria by the 1990s. Hamra and his family were among the final wave, settling in Brooklyn. The Syrian president, Ahmad al-Shar’a, sent one of his advisors, Musa al-Umar, to accompany the delegation when they visited one of the synagogues, now in ruins. There are twenty-two synagogues in Syria, all of them closed, witnesses to what was once a thriving community.
Also, in February 2025, another gesture remembering the Jews who once formed an integral part of the Arabic-speaking world was notable. The Ministry of Culture in Morocco registered three more Jewish monuments on the list of national heritage sites: a synagogue, a ritual bath and the cemetery in Assilah. The synagogue had been restored in 2022 by order of King Muhammad VI. In Lebanon too, the 2009 restoration of the Magen Abraham synagogue in the Wadi Abu Jamil quarter, once home to many of Lebanon’s Jews before 1948, was a recognition of the Jewish historic presence in Lebanon.
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