After decades in exile, Syria’s Jews visit Damascus

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,