Judy Feld Carr speaks at a National Library of Israel event in 2011. Source: YouTube/National Library of Israel.
JNS
Only two Jews, a brother and sister, remain in Syria today, according to Judy Feld Carr, a musicologist in Toronto who quietly rescued more than 3,000 Syrian Jews between 1977 and 2001. That’s a good thing, the 86-year-old told JNS.
“I can tell you,” Carr said. “I wouldn’t want to be a Jew or have a Jewish community in Syria right now.” (The World Jewish Congress states that “only a tiny remnant” remains of a Jewish community of what had been some 30,000 in Syria before 1947.)
As Carr watched Bashar Assad’s regime fall to rebels and the Syrian president go into exile, she found the new faces unrecognizable, except Abu Mohammad al-Julani, leader of the Islamist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham group, who until recently had a $10 million U.S. bounty on his head. “He certainly has made the world press think that he is really a good guy,” Carr told JNS of al-Julani. “We’re supposed to believe he’s had this major transition into goodness and equality and democracy.”
Errors In BBC Report
Carr had harsh words for a BBC report from Damascus by Lyse Marie Doucet, the channel’s chief international correspondent.
“This is one of the most diverse countries in the Middle East with multiple Christian and Muslim sects,” Doucet reported. “You can see it here in the Old City, all the different Quarters—Jewish, Muslim, Christian. They’re all here. They want to believe they have a space now as Syria embarks on this new chapter.”
“I’ve never heard anything so dumb in my life,” Carr told JNS. “That Jews and Muslims and Christians are going to live together happily right now. What Jews was she referring to? The Jewish quarter is empty in Damascus. There are no Jews left.”
“Who exactly are the Jews, who are going to be living in a good relationship with whomever it is that has taken over the country,” she added.
Carr, who helped the last Syrian Jewish family that she was able to assist on Sept. 11, 2001,
Rina Hever, mother of Guy Hever, an Israeli soldier who disappeared in 1997, has been in touch with Carr, who also hopes that two other Israelis, Yehuda Katz and Zvi Feldman, who have been missing since 1982, might also be recovered.
Body Of Israeli Spy
Efforts are reportedly underway to find and repatriate the body of Eli Cohen, an Israeli spy who was executed in Damascus in 1965. “If that were humanly possible that would be wonderful,” Carr told JNS. “Over the years, we asked everybody that I was working with and getting out, ‘Did you know anything?’ But nobody did.”
Getting Out In’70s
Carr began clandestine contact with Syrian Jews in 1973 when about 4,000 Jews lived in Damascus, Aleppo and Qamishli. Conditions were oppressive for Jews in Syria under the dictatorship of Hafez Assad, father of Bashar Assad, Carr told JNS.
Most Jews lived in ghettos completely isolated from the outside world, and were banned from emigrating and under constant surveillance by the Mukhabarat secret police. Jews needed permission to travel more than three miles, and some young Jews, who tried to escape, were caught and jailed. Relatives of those who managed to flee were arrested and tortured, Carr told JNS.
The first Jew whom she helped escape from the country, in 1977, was one such relative. For four years before that, she had been sending Jewish materials to Syria but hadn’t considered helping Jewish people get out. “That was the last thing I ever thought I would be doing,” she told JNS. “It was initially just a communication link between Toronto and the Syrian Jewish community.”
Torture In Damascus
Then a Syrian Jewish woman, who was living in Toronto, went to Damascus to see her brother, a rabbi. When the woman returned, she told Carr about the torture that her brother had endured, because three of his kids escaped the country. The rabbi was suffering from bladder cancer, she told Carr.
“I figured, ‘I’m going to see if I can get him out, because there’s a good reason. He’s sick,’” Carr told JNS.
Canadian government officials turned her down repeatedly, Carr said. In 1977, the Ontario general election brought in the Progressive Conservative Party and Carr found a sympathetic minister, who agreed to try to arrange for papers for the rabbi via the British embassy.
“The British turned it down,” Carr said. “They wouldn’t do it for a Jew.”
In the latter part of 1977, Carr got the rabbi into Canada—she won’t say how—and took him to a hospital, where a Jewish doctor, who survived Auschwitz, welcomed him in Hebrew. The doctor told Carr that in all his years of practice, and even at Auschwitz, he had never seen a body tortured as much as the rabbi had been.
After a few weeks of treatment, the rabbi was able to travel to Israel to see his mother, whom he hadn’t seen since she fled Syria in 1948. “Sadly, his mother had Alzheimer’s and didn’t recognize him,” Carr said.
In Israel, the rabbi asked Carr, who was visiting with her now late husband, if she could get his oldest daughter out of Syria. “What do you say to a dying man?” she told JNS. “I said ‘yes,’ but I didn’t know how to do it. I really did not know how to do it.”
“It took me a year and a half, and that was the beginning,” she told JNS.
Underground Network
For the next 24 years, Carr and a small committee in Toronto raised funds from private donors, created an underground network in Syria, and negotiated and ransomed 3,200 Jews, she told JNS.
“I didn’t initiate anything with those who wanted to leave. That would have endangered the whole operation,” she said. “The Jews had to find me. I didn’t offer, ‘Hey I hear somebody wants to leave, do you want me to help you?’ I didn’t do that.”
“I was the last way out of the country, and it ended up in some cases that I could only get the parents and one child, because the child was sick, and the other kids were left behind,” she said. “It was like ‘Sophie’s Choice,’ but eventually, I got the other children, but it took time. It took years.”
Carr is proud that she was able to keep her work secret. “I never lost a Jew,” she said. “Meaning, I was so careful that not one person was arrested because of me.”
Files with handwritten details about each Jew she saved remain in her Toronto home. As no Israeli institution has expressed interest in them, she told JNS that she is considering donating them to the Royal Ontario Museum.
In 2012, Carr received one of the first Israeli President’s Medals of Honor, alongside former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz, among others. “The nice thing was that my Israeli grandchildren saw it,” she told JNS.
