A few months ago, to my own astonishment, I found myself at the bombed-out remains of the oldest synagogue in Syria. The Eliyahu Hanavi Synagogue is said to have been built above the cave where the prophet Elijah hid from Queen Jezebel nearly 3,000 years ago. It’s located in Jobar, a village on the outskirts of Damascus that was totally destroyed during the civil war. The synagogue represents a symbolic link to the presence of a significant Jewish minority that existed in the country since the time of King David – as many as 100,000 of them as recently as a century ago. Remnants of that community survived until the 1990s, when the 15,000 or so still living in Syria were allowed to leave. There are just six Jews left in Syria today.
I had come to Syria thinking that a project to rebuild the Jobar synagogue might be a good way to engage American Jews in the country’s revival, but I quickly saw that it wouldn’t be possible. The devastation was total. And that, of course, reflected the apocalyptic legacy of Syria’s 14-year civil war, which took the lives of 600,000 civilians and displaced half of the population of 24 million. On December 8, 2024, the vicious Baathist regime of Bashar al-Assad finally collapsed, paving the way for the resistance to take power. Today a former jihadist leader by the name of Ahmed al-Sharaa is ruling the country from the presidential palace in Damascus.
I had come to Syria as part of a “Good Will Jewish Mission to Syria,” organized by Asher Lopatin, a Michigan rabbi who’s an eternal optimist with an unquenchable passion to perfect the world. One member of the delegation was David Horovitz, the founding editor of The Times of Israel, who wrote that it felt “surreal” to be welcomed in the capital of one of Israel’s major enemies. Lawrence Schiffman, an authority on the Dead Sea Scrolls and Talmudic literature, used the same word in one of our meetings to convey his surprise that our group’s very obvious Jewish character proved a non-issue everywhere we went. Everyone else, I think, felt the same way.
Other stops reinforced this link to the Jewish past. These included a visit to the historic Jewish cemetery with the 400-year-old tomb of Rabbi Chaim Vital, the foremost disciple of Rabbi Isaac Luria who founded the Kabbalist school of Jewish mystical thought; and to the extraordinary paintings and frescoes dated to 245 AD from the ancient Dura-Europos Synagogue in eastern Syria. They were discovered in 1932 and transported piece by piece to Damascus, where they are now protected and preserved by the country’s National Museum. The experience of seeing this extraordinary exhibit, beautifully captured by David Horovitz in his account of our visit, was enhanced by the fact that Jill Joshowitz, a member of our group who’s a Judaica curator based in Pittsburgh, had just completed a manuscript about the Dura Europos frescoes and other Biblical art from the Jewish late antiquity.
We were also taken to a police station to see two gilded doors that had been stolen the previous week from a local synagogue and quickly recovered by the local force. The fact that we were being filmed at the police station by a Syrian TV crew, which was happy to record a statement of thanks by Rabbi Lopatin, clearly showed that our Syrian hosts saw our visit as an opportunity to project the image of a new Syria, open to the world and committed to building a lawful and pluralist society.
Our meetings with government officials bolstered this message. At the Foreign Ministry we met with Qutaiba Idlbi, the ministry’s Director of American Affairs who was previously a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council in Washington. His message was twofold and very frank. He told us that Syrians are eager to “build new bridges” to the outside world, and noted hopefully that “many people in Israel want to turn the page.” He then hastened to add that that sentiment was not shared by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was “leading Israel into a period of international isolation.”
No one in the delegation challenged this view. But Idlbi insisted that “a stable Syria is in the interest first and foremost of Israel.” He was telling this to us with a sense of urgency, since he said that Syria had only “a slim window” to make a fresh start and not fall back into civil war.
This was also the view of Mohammad Nidal al-Shaar, the minister of economy and industry. He told us that “Syria will be gone, with terrible implications” for the entire region, if it doesn’t succeed in using the present rare opening to rebuild its economy and society. There has been significant progress on the reconstruction front. Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the Emirates have already pledged almost $30 billion in investment for infrastructure rebuilding and power generation, and more investment is likely to be forthcoming from the Gulf as well as from Jordan, Turkey and other countries.
In addition, the government has launched several vital economic reforms, including introducing a new currency to combat inflation and restore public confidence. In addition, the government has taken the hard but important step of cutting energy subsidies, and it is introducing a new currency to combat inflation and restore public confidence. Mastercard has also just signed a milestone agreement with the Syrian Central Bank that will reintegrate Syria into the global financial system, giving Syrians access to modern financial services and the ability to use credit cards for the first time since the start of the civil war. Meanwhile, the U.S. Senate has voted to repeal key sanctions, and Congress is expected to approve their repeal before the end of the year. Al-Sharaa’s visit to the White House earlier this month appears to have accelerated the normalization of U.S.-Syrian ties.
During our visit we also met with Hind Kabawat, the minister of social affairs and labor who is the only woman and Christian in the cabinet. Kabawat is a long-time peace activist who has promoted interfaith tolerance. She contributed a chapter to a collection of essays by Arab and Jewish “peacemakers” describing her efforts in Syria before the civil war to create a nonviolent bridge between all sides. Having grown up with Bashar al-Assad, she said that if you disagreed with him, “it’s your last day.” Al-Sharaa, by contrast, “listens and wants dialogue.”
No one we met was as forthright as Kabawat in praising al-Sharaa as a respectful and thoughtful leader. But nothing that we experienced during our visit was inconsistent with her characterization or indicative that al-Sharaa was building a personality cult.
Al-Sharaa is still just at the beginning of his effort to revive Syria, and he still faces huge challenges, none more formidable than trying to heal the country’s deep ethnic and sectarian divisions. The government has yet to establish a credible process of transitional justice for former Assad officials complicit in war crimes, which contributed to the wave of vigilante justice and sectarian violence against Alawites in Syria’s coastal region.
Skeptics note that the government has failed to take effective accountability measures for the perpetrators of deadly attacks against minorities in both the coastal violence last March and the communal conflict in Suwayda in July, though just last Sunday the government committee investigating the Suwayda events announced the arrest of a number defense and interior ministry officials. But the reluctance until now to challenge Sunni hardliners, who remain part of al-Sharaa’s support base, accounts for the failure to recognize the distinctive ethnic, linguistic, and religious identities of the Kurdish, Druze and other minorities in the interim constitution.
Finding a balance between providing meaningful autonomy for Syria’s minorities and building a functional central government with authority throughout the country will be very difficult, especially since Damascus also has to deal with pressures from neighboring countries, Turkey and Israel above all.
At the end of our visit, several of us issued a statement calling for “a new beginning in Syria.” We never mentioned Israel, but we said that “Syria’s success in building a pluralist society governed by the rule of law will greatly enhance the prospect for peace in the Middle East.” The prospect of that happening is very uncertain, but it was hard to imagine when the Assad dictatorship fell less than a year ago that Syria would have come as far as it has. This is a rare bright spot in what has been an otherwise dark and perilous time. We need to appreciate its importance and do what we can to help the process of transition that has now begun move steadily – even briskly – forward.
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The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Middle East Broadcasting Networks.
Carl Gershman
The founding president of the National Endowment for Democracy.
