The Human Cost of the War in Syria

Syria Program 1 2016 June 2

“A flow of energy and a charge of possibility is generated by our getting together. That’s especially what we hope for tonight.”

With these words, Rabbi Greenstein introduced a program at Shomrei last Thursday night (June 2) to acquaint the community – not just our own congregants, but all of Montclair – with the human cost of the Syrian civil war and refugee crisis. More than 100 men, women and children came from many corners of New Jersey – Muslim women with heads covered, Jewish men with heads covered, people of a variety of faiths, students and adults.

Syria2 2016 june 2Mohamed T. Khairullah, the mayor of Prospect Park and a native of Aleppo, Syria’s largest city, bore witness to the destruction of lives and property with stories and photographs from his regular trips to Syria. He urged us all to think of the victims as people we know, lest we become desensitized. He projected a photo of a bombed-out apartment building, a typical scene in Syria since the civil war began in 2011, and then revealed that it had been the home of his wife’s family.

Syria3 2016 june 2Before 2011, Syria had a population of 21 million, he said. Now there are 4.9 million refugees outside of Syria and 6.6 million people displaced within the country. Since March, 2011, 11.5 percent of the population has been killed or injured. More than half the hospitals and 40,000 schools have been destroyed or severely damaged. Schools and hospitals have relocated underground, some in caves, and half of the country’s children are no longer in school at all, for fear that they will be killed while trying to learn.

Khairullah showed videos  he had taken of neighborhoods that have been abandoned as a result of fighting. Amid the rubble of one house were coffee cups and breakfast trays, apparently left behind in mid-meal. Storefronts were bombed out, doors knocked off their hinges, walls pocked with gaping holes from anti-aircraft artillery.

Syria4 2016 june 2Another speaker was Shlomo Bolts, of the Syrian American Council, who also traces his ancestry to Aleppo – in his case, to Jewish Aleppo.  The families of both men came to the United States as refugees – Khairullah’s fleeing the tyranny of Hafez Al Assad, father of the current president; Bolts’ family fleeing anti-Jewish oppression in Syria on one side and the Holocaust on the other. “History does echo and too many people in the country are not hearing the echoes,” Bolts said.

Everyone acknowledged that there are no simple answers. Janice Cohn, a psychotherapist in Montclair, arranged the forum after founding a program called Kids Embracing Kids to give children a vehicle for helping Syrian refugees. She said it was her hope that concerned citizens could come together and begin to find constructive ways to help the Syrians and the refugees. The speakers called on the audience to mobilize for U.S. intervention to halt the war in Syria. Waddah Azzawi, a pharmacist who drove up from Maywood to support the speakers, at one point raised his hand to offer a comment, but ended up not speaking. Asked afterwards what he had intended to say, he answered, “I wanted to say that Obama announced two years ago that we would house ten thousand refugees and we didn’t. Christie doesn’t want refugees. Trump doesn’t want refugees. The government, the culture doesn’t want to host refugees. Aren’t we the land of immigrants?”

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