Our Man in Damascus

With only eight Jews remaining in Syria, most of them elderly, Bachor Simantov assumes that in a few years, no Jews will be left in Syria at all. Simantov was born in Damascus, and while his 11 siblings all fled over the years, he decided to stay put, serving as the outspoken leader of his vanishing kehillah, while hoping — in light of the fast-changing balance of power in the region — for better times

“Shalom.”

“Salam.”

From his living room in Damascus’s once-pulsating old Jewish quarter, Bachor Simantov’s smiling face appears on my computer screen — a full head of gray hair, a few well-deserved wrinkles, sharp, twinkling eyes that have seen much in their 74 years. These days, Simantov, one of the last Jews in Syria and head of what’s left of Damascus’s nearly vanished Jewish community, is thrilled to finally be able to freely communicate with siblings, friends, and media people in Israel. “History,” he says in our FaceTime conversation, “is changing more quickly than I’d ever imagined.”

While Damascus’s few other Jews have long refused to speak for fear of reprisals, Simantov has never been media-shy. He told me that he has no problem speaking with Israeli journalists and is not afraid.

“In this new regime, there’s freedom. You can say what you want to whoever you want,” he says. In fact, Simantov says he’s been speaking openly about his faith for years, and reports that he’s never encountered any discrimination, although he admits that his fellow coreligionists would never speak openly for fear of being branded as spies or collaborators.

Simantov, for his part, happens to be quite media-savvy, and is delighted by his own social media presence and popularity. “The whole world follows me,” he says, considering himself the unofficial representative of Syria’s last handful of Jews. He posts clips from interviews he’s given to various channels, footage from the Jewish quarter in Damascus, and photos of him playing tennis with friends at the Tishreen sports club. And it was his photo of the allegedly desecrated gravesite of Rav Chaim Vital that went viral a few months back. Despite wariness of the new regime in the international arena — leader Ahmed al-Sharaa, aka al-Julani, is a former ISIS terrorist, who up until last year had a $10-million US bounty on his head — Simantov avers that the new rule has enabled this openness, something that wasn’t possible before.