After decades in exile, Syria's Jews return home

For the first time in three decades, Rabbi Joseph Hamra and his son Henry read from a Torah scroll in a synagogue in the heart of Syria's capital Damascus, carefully passing their thumbs over the handwritten text as if still in awe they were back home.

The father and son fled Syria in the 1990s, after then-Syrian president Hafez al-Assad lifted a travel ban on the country's historic Jewish community, which had faced decades of restrictions including on owning property or holding jobs.

Virtually all of the few thousand Jews in Syria promptly left, leaving less than 10 in the Syrian capital. Joseph and Henry - just a child at the time - settled in New York. The new authorities have said all of Syria's communities will play a role in their country's future.

But incidents of religious intolerance and reports of conservative Islamists proselytizing in public have kept more secular-minded Syrians and members of minority communities on edge.

While the synagogues and Jewish school in the Old City remained relatively well-preserved, Syria's largest synagogue in Jobar, an eastern suburb of Damascus, was reduced to rubble during the nearly 14-year civil war that erupted after Assad's violent suppression of protests against him.

Jobar was home to a large Jewish community for hundreds of years until the 1800s and the synagogue, built in honor of the biblical prophet Elijah, was looted before it was destroyed.