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I THE DIASPORA I
Happy New Year
From
The Staff
at
Identity
Continued from preceding page
we were there purely as
guests of the organizers."
Dror Zadok, a member of
the symposium's executive
committee and Mr. Dorsman's
business partner, has schedul-
ed an address on forming an
Israeli-American national
organization. Mr. Zadok has
long been active among
Israeli-Americans, and has
even formed a division for
them within the Greater
Miami Jewish Federation.
But his talk was canceled,
due to the presence of Israeli
officials.
Mr. Dorsman said, however,
that plans are moving for-
ward to create a tentatively
named Israeli-American
League, which would sponsor
further programs and provide
non-partisan support for
Israel. He said more than 100
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DESIGN ♦ MANUFACTURE ♦ INSTALL
288-4100
86
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 1991
e9t - n9qoi4
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
The Time To Rescue
Syrian Jewry Is' Now
352-8580
181 SOUTH WOODWARD AVENUE
BIRMINGHAM, MICH. 48011
symposium attendees had fill=
ed out questionnaires in-
dicating further interest in
such a group.
Face-to-face discussions
with symposium attendees
confirmed Mr. Dorsman's
assessment. "We're sick of be-
ing ignored by the Jews here.
We want to have a group of
our own," said a late 30-ish
Israeli who would only iden-
tify himself as Yossi from
Miami Beach.
According to Yaakov
Nissim, who said he has a
restaurant in Sunny Isles,
"We worked hard to make our
businesses succeed here. My
wife worked every day and
night, except Shabbat. Now
we would like to have a
voice." ❑
ith the opening of
the long-locked
gates of the Soviet
Union some two years' ago
and the dramatic airlift to
Israel of thousands of Ethio-
pian Jews, the largest re-
maining hostage Jewish corn-
munity is in Syria. There
some 4,000 Jews are denied
permission to emigrate, sub-
jected to constant harassment
and, in numerous instances,
imprisoned and tortured.
"The time has come for
Israel and world Jewry to
place the issue of Syrian
Jewry at the top of the Jewish
agenda and for American
Jews to insist forcefully that
their government induce
Syrian President Hafez al-
Assad to let the Jews of Syria
go," said Dr. Gilbert Kahn, ex-
ecutive director of the Coun-
cil for the Rescue of Syrian
Jews.
"We Jews must raise our
own consciousness of the
issue . . . and rouse the cons-
cience of the world," Dr. Kahn
told the participants in the
annual conference of the
American Jewish Press
Association. He showed them
a 12-minute videotape
documenting the plight of the
Syrian Jewish community. "If
we have learned anything
from the Holocaust, it is that
we must move heaven and
earth to rescue Jews in peril,"
he said.
The hapless remnant of a
David Frank is the editor of
New Jersey's MetroWest
Jewish News.
2,500-year-old community —
which numbered more than
20,000 in the late 1940s — is
concentrated in three cities:
an estimated 3,300 in
Damascus, 550 in Aleppo and
150 in Kamishli. They are
subjected to round-the-clock
surveillance by the Mukha-
barat (Syria's secret police)
and live in constant fear and
insecurity, never knowing
when even harsher treatment
might befall them, said Dr.
Kahn.
Jews cannot easily obtain
permission to travel abroad
and, when they do, they must
deposit a substantial — and
sometimes unaffordable —
sum ($5,000-$10,000 in a
country in which the annual
per capita income is less than
$3,000) and leave some
members of their family
behind as hostages. These
restrictions — which flout the
fundamental rights of free
emigration recognized in the
Helsinki Accords — are also
direct violations of the
Universal Declaration of
Human Rights, to which
Syria is a signatory.
"If a child misses a day at
school, the Muhkabarat show
up at the house to check the
reason," said Dr. Kahn.
"When Congressman Larry
Smith, D-Fla., asked to see an
elderly storekeeper in Aleppo
in order to give him regards
from his son, now living in
Miami, the old man arrived
cringing, convinced some
terrible fate awaited him
once summoned by the auth-
orities."
While life in Syria is no
great pleasure for any citizen,
said Dr. Kahn, the Jews have