Smuggler of the Syrians

J udy Feld Carr Toronto Canada

The moment I became a household name

One day in 1972 I read a report in the Jerusalem Post about 12 Jews who had attempted to escape from Syria and were caught and brutally murdered. My husband and I were appalled and we decided we had to do something about it. We contacted the Israeli consulate who told us to act on our own.

We had no knowledge of the country so we started by trying to call someone in the Jewish community in Damascus. After two weeks we got through to a Syrian operator who connected us to a Jewish woman who happened to be an informer on other Jews. In what can only be described as bashert she wasn’t home at the time. Instead her husband gave us the name and address of the Jewish school and its rabbi.

We got in touch with them and started sending religious items. Eventually we were communicating through coded messages and I built up a network of secret contacts in Syria. No one in Syria talked about it — it was too dangerous — and no one here knew about it. The Syrian regime forbade Jews from emigrating but there were officials I could bribe to let Jews out. For the next 28 years I arranged for more than 3 000 Syrian Jews to be smuggled out of Aleppo Damascus and Qamishli to North America and Israel.

I also had the opportunity to rescue precious items like books and antiques. Once when I was in Israel meeting with a representative of the Israeli Museum I was told about the lost Damascus Codex — the Keter. This Tanach was written in the Middle Ages and rumor had it that it was hidden in Damascus. But no one had heard about it for more than 500 years. The Syrians knew the value of the Keter and had it in their inventory; they didn’t want it leaving the country. In the end I successfully smuggled out the Keter along with other books.