Before he left Syria for the United States in 1992, Henry Hamra worked in the garment trade with a local boy born to a Jewish mother and a Muslim father in Damascus. He got to know the family, but lost touch when he left Syria at the age of 15.

This week, on his first trip back to Syria, Hamra reconnected with his former coworker’s brother while visiting the neighborhood.

“He was hugging me and kissing me and saying, ‘Don’t leave us alone. We want to see you. We want to have a connection with you,'” Hamra said.

The encounter was part of a warm welcome an American Jewish delegation received this week in Damascus, the first visit by US Jews to Syria since the fall of the Assad regime. Hamra and his father, Rabbi Yusuf Hamra, made the trip to reconnect with their Syrian roots and check on the state of Jewish sites. Alongside the positive reception, they found a depleted Jewish community and that most Jewish sites were in disrepair.

The four-day trip was organized by the Syrian Emergency Task Force (SETF), a US-based nonprofit founded in 2011 in response to the civil war and Assad dictatorship. The delegation flew on Qatar Airways from New York to Doha, and from Doha to Damascus.

The delegation of nine included the Hamras, members of SETF, and Rabbi Asher Lopatin, the director of community relations at the Jewish Federation of Greater Ann Arbor, in Michigan. The group visited a former Jewish school, several synagogues, and a Jewish cemetery, as well as non-Jewish sites, Lopatin said.

Lopatin does not have Syrian ancestry and connected to the trip through a Muslim doctor in Detroit he collaborates with on interfaith work. He said the group received “VIP treatment” at the airport and that he walked around the Jewish quarter of Damascus wearing a kippah.

“Kids, adults, the security people, they were excited that Jews are coming back, because what it means to them is that there’s this vision of a new Syria that is unified, and everyone is Syrian,” he said. “Everyone that we met that found out we were Jewish was so excited. It was warm.”

Hamra said the trip was part of a personal journey to reconnect with his birthplace. His “best years” were his childhood in Syria, living in the tight-knit Jewish community, which dissipated after the move to the US.

“The family, the friends, we were together. We were stuck together. The whole community was like one family,” he said. “Then you’re changing a whole country. Especially when you go to America, you get lost in the big city.”

When he was around 20, he began researching the community’s history in Syria, visiting libraries and collecting pictures, antiquities and videos.

He connected with Mouaz Moustafa, the director of........

© The Times of Israel