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22 Friday May 10, - 1985
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NEWS
Kosins
Jews Bid Farewell
To Lebanese Home
Uptown
Southfield Rd. at
11 1/2 Mile • 559-3900
Big & Tall
Southfield at
10 1/2 Mile • 569-6930
BY RICHARD LOBELL
Special to The Jewish News
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Yaffa Levy in Sidon's synagogue.
ROsh Hanikra — Members . of
the Levy family, were the last
Jews of Sidon. They were the final
vestige of a community that once
numbered 500 Jews who lived in
peace with their neighbors near
the Mediterranean, in southern
Lebanon.
The Levy family — Jamille
(Yaffa), 54, her four children ages
17 to 25, and her sister and their
mother left recently with the
withdrawing Israeli Defense
Forces from the ancient city that
could no longer be called their
home.
"My husband Yosef, who was a
tailor, died in 1977 and we consid-
ered moving then," said Mrs.
Levy, a fifth generation Sidonese
Jew. "But his brother was still
here then and he looked after us.
When my daughter Malka mar--
ried seven years ago, and she and
her husband moved to Brazil, I
thought the family' might follow
her. However, we felt my mother
was too old and ill to face such a
move and the other four children
were still in school. In any case we
weren't badly off and Sidon had
always been our home."
The Levy home was a spacious
old apartment on the top floor of a
two-story building overlooking
the Mediterranean, the fishing
port of Sidon, and the remains of a
Crusader castle that juts out into
the sea. Today, after years of civil
war and other fighting, the area is
in ruins.
The Levys' home is at the edge
of the Casbah, the city's mar-
ketplace. The area was once
mostly Jewish and the narrow,
twisting lanes which wind their
way from her door to the
synagogue in the middle of the
Casbah, once passed mainly
Jewish homes and shops.
In 1948, after the outbreak of
the Arab-Israeli war, the Levys
and other Jews of Sidon fled to the
mountains or the anonymity of
Beirut. Although Lebanon re-
mained neutral in the war, the
Jews, being Jews, feared repris-
als. The Levy family returned
from the mountains after a year.
The four subsequent Arab-
Israeli wars were also tense times
for the Jews of Lebanon, although
they enjoyed freedom unheard of
in any other Arab country. But
over the years, more and more
Lebanese Jews felt that Sidon
held no future for them. Since
1975 the Levys were the only
Jews left in Sidon.
Mrs. Levy still holds the keys to
the synagogue, in the alleys of the
old marketplace. She would fre-
quently stop to say "hello" to her
neighbors. Most of them were
Palestinians, but Mrs. Levy was
on excellent terms with them.
Before leaving Sidon for good,
she took one last walk through the
neighborhood that had been home
to her and her family for so many
generations. She pointed to doors:
"The Cohens lived here. Over
there, the Simantovs." She stop-
ped by the closed doors of what
had been her husband's tailor
shop; she seemed wistful.
The synagogue was well over a
hundred years old. The pale blue
walls were crumbling and the
bimah looked as though it would
topple over at any moment. Some
prayer shawls and books sat in an
old cupboard, left there by Israeli
soldiers.
The last place that Mrs. Levy
went to bid farewell was the
Jewish cemetery, on a hill over-
looking the sea. A Palestinian
refugee camp now surrounds the
old cemetery, and the tombstones
are in disrepair. Yaffa Levy stop-
ped by her husband's grave and
stood silently for a while. "This
has been our home for so long,"
said Mrs. Levy, staring south-
wards over the graves to the sea.
"I wish we could stay, but now it is
no longer possible.