Eli Yashar, 62, carries on a 3000-year-old tradition
[Tel Aviv] Sometime in the year 1999 a pair of German documentarists wandering through Syria ran across the workshops of the Yashar family in the Old City of Damascus, and were dumbfounded to find themselves amid a bustling hive of Jewish artisans working in exotic woods, copper and silver, creating exquisite adornments and cabinetry.
Compelled to record what they saw, they put together a small, black-and-white booklet called Jüdische Handwerker von Damaskus—Jewish Artisans of Damascus.
Today, Eli Yashar thumbs through his pristine copy of the brochure pointing out pictures of a massive ebony cabinet intricately inlaid with mother-of-pearl, shining beneath a large portrait of Hafez al-Assad, the notorious dictator of Syria who died in 2000. Yashar’s extensive family not only produced furniture for the Assad clan—furniture that was displayed to the world as exemplary of the Syrian people—but created many of the copper and silver artifacts that were given to foreign dignitaries as gifts from the Syrian people.
Laughing, Eli and his brother Shlomo, 50, recall a customer in the Syrian military telling them of a Saudi sheikh who was entranced by the gift he received—a sophisticatedly engraved copper tray—but perturbed by the Star of David etched into its middle. “The Syrian told the Saudi, ‘If you like that sort of thing you have no choice, because only Jews make these crafts, with their star within. For hundreds of years.’” They chuckle.
Recorded Jewish history in Syria stretches back 3000 years, but today, most estimates hold that only 18 Jews remain in the country, all of them elderly. There are diasporic Syrian Jewish communities everywhere from Buenos Aires to Brooklyn.
The Yashar family, parents, four sons and four daughters, left Syria in the year 2000, under the auspices of a program created by then US President Bill Clinton to sponsor the evacuation of the Jews. Most escaped via Turkey, leaving with little more than the shirts on their backs. The Yashars left behind three shops, warehouses and a spacious 5-room villa.
And they were the lucky ones. In the early 1970s, four young women from the Damascus Jewish community were caught while attempting to flee into Lebanon. One was a friend of the Yashar sisters. Their bodies were found raped and mutilated on the Syrian side of the border.
“Five thousand, ten thousand of us went out on the streets carrying the coffins. It was horrifying,” Yashar recalls. “They told us Assad’s chair shook. In all of Syria, no one could move. We made it all the way to the presidential palace in Damascus. Men, women, children, rabbis, asking, ‘why did you kill them?’”
Today, the four Yashar brothers are successful Tel Aviv artisans and shopkeepers, working in a small cluster in the rapidly gentrifying flea market that lies on the Tel Aviv-Jaffa border. At first glance, Yashar’s shop appears to be no more than another den of tchotchkes offering hand-painted Moroccan handles, wooden stamps, Armenian ceramic ashtrays. But step in, and what remains of the great Syrian craftsmanship can be glimpsed on the upper shelves – jewelry cases and cigar boxes made by Eli Yashar and a cousin when they have time to practice their craft.
Yashar displays his handiwork, the sharply carved slivers of oak, lemon and cherry wood inlaid in a hand-engraved base. He proudly says that not a single piece is painted—the bright colors, ranging from pistachio green to midnight black—are all natural.
These days, Hafez al-Assad’s son, Bashar, is in the fifth year of a bloody civil war in which he is supported by Russia and Iran against a motley array of rebel groups who have captured more than half the territory of Syria.
The Yashars watch a lot of Al Jazeera, observing the places in which they grew up, summered and worked, good-naturedly bickering about the channel’s “biases and interests” in Syrian-accented Arabic. Among themselves, they still speak only Arabic.
“The Syrian people are great businessmen,” Eli says. “The country that was once a great artistic and commercial center is now dead.”
The Yashars are not sentimental people. Asked which country they feel a sense of belonging to, Shlomo, the younger brother, says “We were Syrian. Now we are Israeli. So both.”
“My father,” he adds, “as well as everybody else is buried there.”
Eli underscores the bitter memories of his country of birth. As a boy, he was very close to his grandmother who once rushed into the villa and made him turn away from the windows, explaining that she’d seen a truck dump dead bodies in front of the house, and burn them. The boy looked away, but he never forgot.