Syria

“It's quite clear to me that he was trying to recreate the hillside of Haifa with the gardens... It comes from somebody being ripped out from their home.”

Syrian Jewish Playwright Oren Safdie, son of world-renowned architect Moshe Safdie, who designed Habitat 67 along with much of modern Jerusalem, knows loss, regret, and longing. Oren and his father explore their Syrian heritage and their connection to the Jewish state that has developed since Moshe’s father left Aleppo, Syria and moved, in the mid-20th century, to what is modern-day Israel.

Oren also knows that being Jewish is about stepping up. Describing his frustrations with modern anti-Israel sentiments and protests that harken back to 1943, Oren is passionately combating anti-Israel propaganda in theater and academia. 

Abraham Marcus, Associate Professor Emeritus at University of Texas at Austin, joins the conversation with historical insights into Jewish life in Syria dating back to Roman times.

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Show notes:

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Song credits: 

Al Fadimem, Bir Demet Yasemen, Fidayda; all by Turku, Nomads of the Silk Road

Aleppo Bakkashah 

Pond5: 

• “Desert Caravans”: Publisher: Pond5 Publishing Beta (BMI), Composer: Tiemur Zarobov (BMI), IPI#1098108837

• “Oud Nation”: Publisher: Pond5 Publishing Beta (BMI); Composer: Haygaz Yossoulkanian (BMI), IPI#1001905418

• “Arabic (Middle Eastern Music)”: Publisher: Pond5 Publishing Beta (BMI), Composer: Andrei Skliarov, Item ID #152407112

• “Fields Of Elysium”; Publisher: Mysterylab Music; Composer: Mott Jordan; ID#79549862

• “Middle Eastern Dawn”: Publisher: Victor Romanov, Composer: Victor Romanov; Item ID #202256497

• “Ney Flute Melody 01”: Publisher: Ramazan Yuksel; Composer: Ramazan Yuksel; P.R.O. Track: BMI 00712367557

• “Uruk”: Publisher: Pond5 Publishing Beta (BMI); Composer: Marcus Bressler; Item ID: 45886699

• “Suspense Middle East” Publisher: Victor Romanov, Composer: Victor Romanov; Item ID: 196056047

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Episode Transcript:

OREN SAFDIE:  I've sort of wanted to shine a light on North American Jews being hypercritical of Israel.

Because I've spent a lot of time in Israel. And I know what it is. It's not a simple thing. And I think it's very easy for Americans in the comfort of their little brownstones in Brooklyn, and houses in Cambridge to criticize, but these people that live in Israel are really standing the line for them.

MANYA BRACHEAR PASHMAN: The world has overlooked an important episode in modern history: the 800,000 Jews who left or were driven from their homes in the Middle East and North Africa in the mid-20th century.

Welcome to the second season of The Forgotten Exodus, brought to you by American Jewish Committee. This series explores that pivotal moment in history and the little-known Jewish heritage of Iran and Arab nations. As Jews around the world confront violent antisemitism and Israelis face daily attacks by terrorists on multiple fronts, our second season explores how Jews have lived throughout the region for generations despite hardship, hostility, and hatred, then sought safety and new possibilities in their ancestral homeland.

I'm your host, Manya Brachear Pashman. Join us as we explore untold family histories and personal stories of courage, perseverance, and resilience from this transformative and tumultuous period of history for the Jewish people and the Middle East. 

The world has ignored these voices. We will not. 

This is The Forgotten Exodus. Today's episode: leaving Aleppo.

MANYA: Playwright and screenwriter Oren Safdie has had just about enough of the anti-Israel sentiments on stage and screen. And what irks him the most is when it comes from Jewish artists and celebrities who have never spent time in the Middle East’s one and only democracy. Remember film director Jonathan Glazer’s speech at the 2024 Academy Awards?

JONATHAN GLAZER: Right now, we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people. Whether the victims of October the … [APPLAUSE]

MANYA: Yeah, Oren didn’t much appreciate his own Jewishness being hijacked in that moment. Drawing a moral equivalence between the Nazi regime and Israel never really sits well with him.

OREN: I do feel like they're very selective in their criticism of Israel. You know, it's very easy to say, ‘Oh, well, they didn't do that. They don't do this.’ But it's a complicated situation. And to simplify it, is just to me beyond, especially if you're not somebody who has spent a lot of time in Israel.

MANYA: Oren Safdie has penned more than two dozen scripts for stages and screens around the world. His latest film, Lunch Hour, starring Alan Cumming, is filming in Minnesota. 

Meanwhile, The Man Who Saved the Internet with A Sunflower, another script he co-wrote, is on the festival circuit. And his latest play Survival of the Unfit, made its North American debut in the Berkshires this summer, is headed to Broadway.

And by the way, since an early age, Oren Safdie has spent quite a bit of time in Israel. His father Moshe Safdie is the legendary architect behind much of modern Jerusalem, Ben-Gurion International Airport, and the Yad Vashem Holocaust History Museum. 

Oren’s grandfather, Leon, emigrated from Syria.

OREN: I'm sort of a synthesis of the two main parts that established Israel because my mother came from Poland, escaped the Holocaust. And my father's family came from Syria. So, I'm a half breed. 

I've never been asked about my Sephardic side, even though that was really the dominant side that I grew up with. Because my mother’s family was quite small. I grew up in Montreal, it was much more in the Syrian tradition for holidays, food, everything like that.

My grandfather was from Aleppo, Syria, and my grandmother was from Manchester, England, but originally from Aleppo. Her family came to Manchester, but two generations before, had been from Aleppo. So, they’re both Halabi Jews. 

MANYA: Halabi refers to a diverse group of Jews from Aleppo, one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world that has gone by several names. The oldest? Haleb. 

Halabi Jews include Mizrahi Jews -- the name for Jews who call the Middle East or North Africa home; and Sephardi Jews, who fled to the region after being expelled from Spain in the 15th Century. 

Jews are believed to have been in what is now Syria since the time of King David and certainly since early Roman times.

ABRAHAM MARCUS: It's a community that starts, as far as we can record, in the Greco-Roman period. And we see the arrival of Islam. So the Jews were really the indigenous people when Arabs arrived.

MANYA: Abraham Marcus, born to parents from Aleppo, is an internationally renowned authority on the city. He served as director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. For the past 16 years, he has been working on a book about the history of Aleppo’s Jews that goes well beyond what has been previously published.

As part of his research, he examined thousands of documents from the Syrian national archive and the Ottoman archive in Istanbul. He also did extensive fieldwork on the ground in Aleppo, documenting the synagogues, cemeteries, residential districts, and workplaces. 

MARCUS: One of the synagogues, the famous ancient synagogue of Aleppo, which dates to the 5th Century, meaning it predates the arrival of Arabs. It is a remarkable structure. Unfortunately, what is left of it now is really a skeleton.

MANYA: Abraham is referring to the Great Synagogue or Central Synagogue of Aleppo, which functioned as the main house of worship for the Syrian Jewish community for more than 1,600 years. For 600 of those years, its catacombs safeguarded a medieval manuscript believed to be the oldest, most complete, most accurate text of the Hebrew Bible, known as the Aleppo Codex. The codex was used by Maimonides as a reference for his magnum opus, the Mishneh Torah, or Jewish religious legal code.

In the 7th Century, Aleppo was conquered by Arab Muslims and a Great Mosque was built. For the next four centuries, the Byzantine Empire, Crusaders, and various Muslim rulers fought to gain control of Aleppo and the surrounding region. A savage Mongol invasion, a bout of the Black Death and another invasion took its toll on the city, and its Jews. 

For most of this time, Muslim rulers treated them as dhimmis, or second-class citizens. 

MARCUS: There were restrictions on dress, which were renewed time and again. They could not carry arms. They could not ride horses.

MANYA: After half of Spain’s Jews converted to Christianity following the pogroms of 1391, the Catholic monarchs issued the Alhambra Decree of 1492 – an edict that expelled any remaining Jews from the Iberian Peninsula to ensure their descendants didn’t revert back to Judaism. 

As Jews fled, many made their way to parts of the Ottoman Empire. In 1516, Aleppo became part of that empire and emerged as a strategic trading post at the end of the Silk Road, between the Mediterranean Sea and Mesopotamia, or modern-day Iraq. As was the case in other parts of the Ottoman Empire, Jews lived relatively comfortably, serving as merchants and tax collectors. 

MARCUS: The policy of the Ottoman Empire was to essentially welcome the Sephardic Jews. The Sultan at the time is reputed to have said, ‘I don't understand the King of Spain. But if he's thinking at all, giving up all this human capital, essentially, we can take it.’ 

Many of the successful Jews in Aleppo and Damascus–in business, as leaders, as rabbis–were Sephardic Jews. They revived these communities, they brought new blood and new energy to them, a new wealth.

MANYA: This was not always the case throughout Ottoman Syria as persecution and pogroms erupted at times. 

By the mid-19th Century, Aleppo’s Jewish population was slightly smaller than that of Baghdad, by about 2,000. In 1869, the opening of the Suez Canal shifted trade away from the route through Syria. Aleppo lost much of its commercial edge, motivating many Jews to seek opportunity elsewhere.

MARCUS: The story of Aleppo is one of a society gradually hemorrhaging, losing people.

They went to Beirut, which was a rising star. And Egypt became very attractive. So they went to Alexandria and Cairo.

And many of the rabbis from the 1880s began to move to Jerusalem where there were yeshivot that were being set up. And in effect, over the next several decades, essentially the spiritual center of Aleppo’s Jews was Jerusalem and no longer Aleppo. 

MANYA: Another turning point for Aleppo came in World War I when the Ottoman Empire abandoned its neutral position and sided with the Central Powers–including Bulgaria, Austria-Hungary and Germany. 

Many wealthy Jews had acquired foreign nationalities from countries that were not allies. Now considered enemy citizens, they were deported and never came back.

In addition, Jews and Christians up to that point could pay a special tax to avoid serving in the army. That privilege ended in 1909.

MARCUS: Because of the Balkan Wars, there was a sense that the empire is going to collapse if they don't essentially raise a large force to defend it. And there was a kind of flight that really decimated the community by 1918, when the war ended.

MANYA: Besides those two wartime exceptions, Abraham says the departure of Jews from Syria was almost always motivated by the promise of better opportunities. In fact, opportunity might have been what drew the Safdie family to and from Aleppo.

MANYA: Originally from Safed, as their name suggests, the Safdie family arrived in Aleppo sometime during the 16th or 17th centuries. By that time, the Jewish community in Safed, one of the Four Holy Cities in Judaism located in modern-day Israel, had transformed it into a lucrative textile center. So lucrative that the sultan of the ruling Ottoman Empire ordered the forced deportation of 1,000 Jewish families to Cyprus to boost that island’s economy. 

It’s not clear if those deportations or the decline that followed pushed the Safdie family north to Aleppo. Most of them stayed for roughly three centuries–through World War One and France’s brief rule during the Interwar period.

But in 1936, amid the Great Depression, which affected Syria as well, Leon Safdie, the ninth of ten children born to textile merchants, moved to Haifa and set up his own trading business. Importing textiles, woolens, and cottons from England and fabrics from Japan and India. 

A year later, he met his wife Rachel who had sailed from Manchester to visit her sister in Jerusalem. She spoke English and a little French. He spoke Arabic and French. They married a month later.

OREN: My grandfather lived in Haifa, he was a merchant like many Syrian Jews were. He imported textiles. He freely went between the different countries, you know, there weren't really so many borders.

A lot of his people he worked with were Arab, Druze, Christian, Muslim. Before independence, even though there was obviously some tension, being somebody who is a Syrian Jew, who spoke Arabic, who spoke French, he was sort of just one of the region.

MANYA: Moshe Safdie was born in 1938. He says the onset of the Second World War created his earliest memories – hosting Australian soldiers in their home for Shabbat and making nightly trips into air raid shelters.

Every summer, the family vacationed in the mountain resorts of Lebanon to visit aunts and uncles that had moved from Aleppo to Beirut. Their last visit to Lebanon in the summer of 1947 culminated with all of the aunts, uncles, and cousins piling into three Chrysler limousines and caravanning from Beirut to Aleppo to visit their grandmother and matriarch, Symbol.

MOSHE: I remember sort of the fabric of the city. I have vague memories of the Citadel of Aleppo, because it was an imposing structure. I remember her – a very fragile woman, just vaguely.

MANYA: While most of Moshe’s memories of Aleppo are vague, one memory in particular is quite vivid. At that time, the United Nations General Assembly was debating the partition plan that would divide what was then the British Mandate of Palestine between Jews and Arabs. Tensions ran high throughout the region. When Moshe’s uncles noticed Moshe wearing his school uniform on the streets of Aleppo, they panicked. 

MOSHE: They were terrified. We were walking in the street, and we had khaki shirts and khaki pants. And it had stitched on it, as required in our school, the school badge, and it said, ‘Thou shalt be humble’ in Hebrew. And they saw that, or at least they noticed we had that, and they said: ‘No, this is very dangerous!’ and they ripped it off.’

MANYA: It would be the first and last time Moshe Safdie visited Aleppo. On the 29th of November, the UN voted on a resolution to divide Palestine into two states, one Arab and one Jewish. The news arrived in Aleppo the following morning.

MARCUS: This was New York time, in the evening, when the decision was made. So already, people started planning demonstrations for the next day, in support of the Palestinians. And that next day began with what was a peaceful demonstration of students, and then all kinds of people joined in and before long it became an attack on Jewish property.

The synagogues were set ablaze. Many Jewish homes were burned, businesses were looted. And so the day ended with the Jews really in a state of fright. 

MANYA: The mob looted the Jewish quarter and burned the Great Synagogue, scattering and desecrating the pages of the Aleppo Codex. The caretaker of the synagogue and his son later returned to the ashes to salvage as much as they could. But most of the community’s leadership took a train to Beirut and never looked back. 

Of course, as previously mentioned, Aleppo had already witnessed a steep decline in its Jewish population. The numbers vary widely, depending on the source, but by 1947, on the eve of the Jewish exodus from Syria, Iraq, and other Arab countries, Aleppo had anywhere between 6,000 and 15,000 Jews, whereas Baghdad had between 75 and 90,000.

MARCUS: More than half the population left within a month. The community after that, in the next two, three weeks, was in a situation in which some people decided that was the end. 

They took possessions that they could, got on buses and left for Beirut. That was the safe destination to go to. And there was traffic between the two areas. 

Some people decided to stay. I mean, they had business, they had interest, they had property that they didn't want to leave. You can imagine the kind of dilemmas face people suddenly, the world has changed, and what do I do? Which part of the fork do I go? 

MANYA: Those who left effectively forfeited their property to the Syrian government. To this day, the only way to reclaim that property and be allowed to sell it is to return and become Syrian citizens.

Those who stayed were trapped. Decimated and demoralized, Aleppo’s Jews came under severe travel restrictions, unable to travel more than four kilometers from their homes without permission from the government, which tracked their comings and goings.

MARCUS: The view was that if they leave, they'll end up in what’s called the Zionist entity and provide the soldiers and aid to the enemy. So the idea was to keep them in. 

So there's a reality there of a community that is now stuck in place. Unable to emigrate. That remained in place until 1970, when things began to relax. It was made possible for you to leave temporarily for a visit. But you have to leave a very large sum as a deposit.

The other option was essentially to hire some smugglers to take you to the Turkish or the Lebanese border, and basically deliver you to another country where Jews had already networked.

The Mossad had people who helped basically transfer them to Israel. But that was very risky. If you were caught, it's prison time and torture. 

Over the next 45 years, many of the young left gradually, and many of them left without the parents even knowing. They will say ‘I'm going to the cinema and I'll come back’.

MANYA: On May 14, 1948, Israel declared independence. But the socialist politics of the new Jewish state did not sit well with Leon Safdie who much preferred private enterprise. He also felt singled out, as did many Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews in Israel at the time. 

OREN: In some ways, it almost created some tension for him on several fronts, right? First of all, between him and his clients, who he had been doing business with in the Arab world, for many years. All of a sudden, those relationships are called into question.

And as my grandfather was an importer of textiles, it was considered a luxury good. And when you’re in wartime, there were rations. 

The high tariffs really killed my grandfather's business. So, he wanted to stay in Israel. He helped with the war effort. He really loved the country and he knew the people, but really for three years, he sat idle and just did not have work. He was a man that really needed to work, had a lot of pride.

MANYA: In 1953, Leon and Rachel sought opportunity once again – this time in Montreal – a move Moshe Safdie would forever resent. When in 1959 he married Oren’s mother Nina, an Israeli expat who was trying to return to Israel herself, they both resolved to return to the Jewish state. Life and phenomenal success intervened.

While studying architecture at McGill University, Moshe designed a modern urban apartment building [Habitat 67] that incorporated garden terraces and multiple stories. It was built and unveiled during the 1967 World’s Fair in Montreal, and Moshe’s career took off. 

OREN: It's quite clear to me that he was trying to recreate the hillside of Haifa with the gardens. And it's something that has sort of preoccupied him for his whole career. It comes from somebody being ripped out from their home. Those kinds of things I think stay with you.

MANYA: Eventually, in 1970, Moshe opened a branch of his architecture firm in Jerusalem and established a second home there. Oren recalls visiting every summer – often with his grandfather Leon.  

OREN: And I remember going with him when he’d come to Israel when I was there, because we used to go pretty much every summer. He would love to go down to Jericho. And we'd sit at the restaurants. I mean, there was a period of time, you know, when it was sort of accepted that Jews could travel to the West Bank, to Ramallah and everything. And he loved to just speak with the merchants and everything, he loved that. He felt so at home in that setting.

It was not dangerous, as it is today, obviously. I think everyone back then thought it was a temporary situation. And obviously, the longer it goes, and the more things happen, it feels more permanent. And of course, that's where we are today. But that time, in my head, sort of just is a confirmation that Jews and Arabs have a lot more in common and can get along … if the situation was different.

MANYA: As the son of an Israeli citizen, Oren is considered an Israeli citizen too. But he concedes that he is not fully Israeli. That requires more sacrifice.

In 1982, at the age of 17, he signed up for Chetz V’Keshet, at that time a 10-week program run in conjunction with the Israel Defense Forces for American and Canadian teens and designed to foster a connection to Israel. The program took place during the First Lebanon War, Israel’s operation to remove terrorists from southern Lebanon, where they had been launching attacks against Israeli civilians.

OREN: So this was a mix of basic training, where we trained with artillery and things and did a lot of war games. And from there, you know, their hope was that you would join the military for three years. And I did not continue. 

I guess there's a part of me that regrets that. Even though I'm an Israeli citizen, I can't say I'm Israeli in the way that Israelis are. If the older me would look back, then I would say, ‘If you really want to be connected to Israel, the military is really the only way.

I'd say at that young age, I didn't understand that the larger picture of what being Jewish, what being Israeli is, and it's about stepping up.

MANYA: Now in his early 50s, Oren tries to step up by confronting the anti-Israel propaganda that’s become commonplace in both of his professional worlds: theater and academia. In addition to writing his own scripts and screenplays, he has taught college level playwriting and screenwriting.

He knows all too often students fall prey to misinformation and consider anything they see on social media or hear from their friends as an authoritative source. 

A few years ago, Oren assigned his students the task of writing a script based on real-life experience and research. One of the students drafted a script about bloodthirsty Israelis killing Palestinian children. When Oren asked why he chose that topic and where he got his facts, the student cited his roommate. 

Oren didn’t discourage him from pitching the script to his classmates, but warned him to come prepared to defend it with facts. The student turned in a script on an entirely different topic.

OREN: You know, there were a lot of plays that came up in the past 10 years that were anti-Israel. You’d be very hard-pressed to find me one that's positive about Israel. No one's doing them.

MANYA: Two of his scripts have come close. In 2017, he staged a play at the St. James Theatre in Old Montreal titled Mr. Goldberg Goes to Tel Aviv– a farce about a gay Jewish author who arrives in Tel Aviv to deliver a blistering attack on the Israeli government to the country’s left-leaning literati. 

But before he even leaves his hotel room, he is kidnapped by a terrorist. Investors lined up to bring it to the silver screen and Alan Cumming signed on to play Mr. Goldberg. But in May 2021, Hamas terrorists launched rockets at Israeli civilians, igniting an 11-day war. The conflict led to a major spike in antisemitism globally. 

OREN: The money people panicked and said, ‘We can't put up a comedy about the Middle East within this environment. Somebody is going to protest and shut us down,’ and they cut out.

MANYA: Two years later, an Israeli investor expressed interest in giving the movie a second chance. Then on October 7 [2023], Hamas launched a surprise attack on 20 Israeli communities -- the deadliest attack on the Jewish people since the Holocaust. More than 1,200 Israelis have been killed, thousands of rockets have been fired on Israel, and more than 100 hostages are still in captivity.

OREN: Mr. Goldberg Goes to Tel Aviv collapsed after October 7th. I don't think anybody would have the appetite for a comedy about a Hamas assassin taking a left-wing Jew hostage in a hotel room.

MANYA: Another play titled “Boycott This” was inspired by Oren’s visit to a coffee shop in Oaxaca, Mexico in 2011. The walls of the cafe were plastered with posters urging boycotts of Israel and accusing it of blood libel. Oren and his daughter created their own posters and stood outside the coffee shop calling on customers to boycott the cafe instead.

But the father and daughter’s impromptu protest is just one of three storylines in the play, including one about the 1943 boycott of Jews in Poland–where his mother spent part of her childhood in hiding during the Holocaust. 

The third storyline takes place in a post-apocalyptic world where Iran has succeeded in wiping Israel off the map. A Jewish woman has been forced to become one of the enemy’s wives – a threat some hostages taken on October 7 have reported hearing from their captors. 

OREN: It was really my attempt to try and show how the boycotts of Israel today, in light of, you know, 1943, were really not different. 

MANYA:  Even now, Oren has not been able to convince a college or theater to stage “Boycott This,” including the Jewish museum in Los Angeles that hosted his daughter’s bat mitzvah on October 7, 2023.   

OREN: I've sort of wanted to shine a light on North American Jews being hypercritical of Israel, which I guess ties into BDS. Because I've spent a lot of time in Israel. And I know what it is. It's not a simple thing. And I think it's very easy for Americans in the comfort of their little brownstones in Brooklyn, and houses in Cambridge to criticize, but these people that live in Israel are really standing the line for them.

MANYA: When Presidents George Bush and Bill Clinton finally secured a legal way for Syrian Jews to leave between 1992 and 1994, most did. The last Jews of Aleppo were evacuated from the city in October 2016.

MARCUS: They took all the siddurim and everything, put them in boxes. It was just essentially closing shop for good. They knew they're not coming back.

MANYA: The food, liturgy, music, the traditions of hospitality and social welfare endure, but far from the world of which it was part. Walk into any synagogue in the Aleppo tradition after sundown on Shabbat and be treated to a concert until dawn – a custom called baqashot.

MANYA: Before Oren’s grandmother Rachel passed away, his cousin Rebecca did a piece for Canadian Broadcast News featuring their 95-year-old grandmother in the kitchen. 

RACHEL SAFDIE: When we were children, we used to love all these dishes. My mother used to make them all the time and it’s very, very tasty. Anything made, Middle East food, is very tasty.

OREN: It's 10 minutes for me to see my grandmother again, in video, cooking the mehshi kusa, which is sort of the stuffed eggplant with the apricots and the meat. And there's really a great moment in it, because they're doing it together and they put it in the oven, and at the end of this 10-minute movie, they all come out of the oven, and like they're looking at it and they're tasting, and my grandmother points …

RACHEL: I know which ones you did. You did this one. 

CBN INTERVIEWER: How do you know? 

RACHEL: I know. And this recipe has been handed down from generation to generation.

OREN: It's so much like my grandmother because she's sort of a perfectionist, but she did everything without measuring. It was all by feel. The kibbeh, beans and lamb and potatoes and chicken but done in a different way than the Ashkenaz. I don’t know how to sort of describe it.  The ka'ake, which were like these little pretzels that are, I'd say they have a taste of cumin in them.

MARCUS: Stuffed aubergine, stuffed zucchini, tomatoes, with rice, pine nuts and ground beef and so forth. Meatballs with sour cherries during the cherry season.

MANYA: Oren would one day like to see where his ancestors lived. But according to Abraham, few Aleppo Jews share that desire. After the Civil War and Siege of Aleppo in 2012 there’s little left to see. And even when there was, Aleppo’s Jews tended to make a clean break.

MARCUS: People did not go back to visit, the second and third generations did not go back. So you see, for example, here Irish people of Irish origin in the United States, they still have families there. And they go, and they take the kids to see what Ireland is like. Italians, they do the same, because they have a kind of sense, this is our origin. 

And with Aleppo, there wasn't. This is a really unusual situation in terms of migrations of people not going back to the place. And I think that probably will continue that way.

MANYA: Syrian Jews are just one of the many Jewish communities who, in the last century, left Arab countries to forge new lives for themselves and future generations. 

Join us next week as we share another untold story of The Forgotten Exodus.

Many thanks to Oren and Moshe for sharing their story. You can read more in Moshe’s memoir If Walls Could Speak: My Life in Architecture.

Too many times during my reporting, I encountered children and grandchildren who didn’t have the answers to my questions because they’d never asked. That’s why one of the goals of this project is to encourage you to ask those questions. Find your stories.

Atara Lakritz is our producer. T.K. Broderick is our sound engineer.

Special thanks to Jon Schweitzer, Nicole Mazur, Sean Savage, and Madeleine Stern, and so many of our colleagues, too many to name really, for making this series possible. 

You can subscribe to The Forgotten Exodus on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts, and you can learn more at AJC.org/theforgottenexodus. 

The views and opinions of our guests don’t necessarily reflect the positions of AJC. 

You can reach us at theforgottenexodus@ajc.org. If you've enjoyed this episode, please be sure to spread the word, and hop onto Apple Podcasts or Spotify to rate us and write a review to help more listeners find us.