At one point, fighters from the PLO guarded the synagogue. But there was no way to protect the Green Line, the divide between West and East Beirut, writes Vijay Prashad [photo credit: Getty Images]
It seems like a century ago I stood in the graveyard in Beirut’s Al-Basta neighbourhood. There was magic in the graveyard, which is in an area of shops — bassata, from which the quarter gets its name, means to “spread your merchandise on the ground”.
I had come on the advice of the Irish journalist Robert Fisk (1946-2020) to see where St. John Philby (1885-1960) had been buried.
During one of our coffees at Café Younes at the upper end of Hamra, I had brought along a copy of Elizabeth Monroe’s Philby of Arabia (1973) an old-fashioned biography riddled with errors but filled with charm — a book written based on Monroe’s conversations with Philby, who had gone from socialism to the British Foreign Office to Islam and then to being the principal advisor of King Abdulaziz Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia.
“You better go have a look at where Philby was buried,” Fisk said. And what Fisk said, I did.
The jaunt, however, was a bit disappointing. I could not find his grave. It was said that Philby’s son, the famous British intelligence agent who had all along been spying for the Soviets, had scrawled on his father’s gravestone something about him being a great explorer. An ancient man at the cemetery told me that a lot of old graves had been covered over by the dead of the civil war.
I got lost on my walk back and found myself in front of the Maghen Abraham synagogue.
The building stopped me because it has an exterior that resembles a Venetian palazzo, the white and yellow ochre walls and embellishments a little out of place in what had been Beirut’s Wadi Abu Jamil, the Jewish Quarter.Â
I understand why the synagogue had been built in this fashion. Beirut is a city of trade and merchants, and it made sense for the Jewish community to erect a grand building to rival other grand buildings (banks and markets). The neighbourhood had other synagogues, mostly in apartments, so this was a statement of the community’s establishment rather than of architectural fidelity to an ancient synagogue.
The synagogue was in mid-restoration. A café nearby was a good place to seek some answers. The man who ran it told me that yes, it is a Jewish place of worship, and yes, it is being resorted.
But, apart from making me a strong coffee, he did not have anything else to tell me. Later, the internet provided some answers, but it was also not sufficient. I went in search of someone who could fill the gaps of my curiosity and turned to one of the people I often sought out to explain the mysteries of Beirut.
Subscribe Now and Listen to our Podcasts OnElias Khoury (1948-2024) was sitting at his desk in the Institute for Palestine Studies, chain-smoking and drinking little cups of strong coffee.
Born in Beirut during the Nakba that befell Palestine, Elias spent his life defending the Palestinian fight for emancipation. From his hospital bed, he posted on Facebook about his ‘year of pain’: “Gaza and Palestine have been brutally beaten for nearly a year too, and they are resilient. They are the model from which I learn each day to love life.”
Elias knew the outlines of the story, but he did not know it all. He knew that the synagogue had been built in the 1920s, that it had been damaged during the civil war, and that it was only during the civil war that Beirut’s Jews began to flee the city – not because of anti-Semitism, but because their neighbourhood fell squarely on the frontline between the two major factions in East and West Beirut. “The civil war drove the Jewish community out,” I wrote in my notebook, probably quoting him. “No one drove them out.”
Beirut’s synagogue is also Calcutta’s synagogue
Calcutta (India), where I was born, is not an ancient city. It was created by trade and resembles Beirut in more ways than I can tell you — there is something about our old cities that makes my blood flow faster.
When I was a little boy, my brother had a friend — Mordy Cohen — who lived in Calcutta’s old Jewish quarter in Bowbazar. Mordy was a bit. Mordy was a bit of a charlatan, who used to hustle the Rabbi to pay him some money so that he could help make a quorum on the days of low attendance in the synagogue.
It was in his home that I first got a taste of the spectacular Baghdadi Jewish Indian food, including the alu makalla that I make and enjoy to this day.
The historians of the Jewish community (Flower Elias and Judith Cooper Elias) say that the first recorded Jewish migrant to Calcutta was Shalom Obadiah Cohen, who came in 1798 from Aleppo, and then a wave of Baghdadi Jews came to trade in this British colonial city from the early 19th century.
Three families, at least, became fabulously wealthy: the Judahs, the Ezras, and the Sassoons – all traders in indigo, silk, and mostly opium. The Sassoon family cornered seventy percent of the opium trade that left Bengal’s shores for China during the 19th century — the details are in Phillip Stansky’s Sassoon: The Worlds of Philip and Sybil, 2003.
As if in a mirror, around the same time as the Baghdadi Jews came to Calcutta, they began to settle in Beirut and gave the city its first chief Rabbi — Moise Yedid-Levy from 1977 to 1829.
Nagi Gergi Zeidan, the author of Juifs du Liban (2020), spent almost thirty years fixated on reconstructing the history of the Jewish community of his country.
Zeidan’s own story is interesting: born into a family rooted in the Syrian Socialist Nationalist Party of Antoun Saadeh, Zeidan developed an interest in the lost story of the Jews of Lebanon and then became the chronicler of that story just as Lebanese Jews left the country for the West and for Israel — although the more accurate book is Tomer Levi’s The Jews of Beirut: The Rise of a Levantine Community, 2012.
In his book, Zeidan has a portrait of the Maghen Abraham synagogue. Moïse Sassoon, who was born in Alexandria (Egypt) in 1867, moved to Calcutta, joined his family members in their thriving business and made his own money as a trader — his mansion on 8, Middleton Street is now an ugly building that houses several offices and apartments.Â
Moïse’s parents Abraham and Ramah Meyer moved to Beirut in 1890, and his father died there seven years later. In 1926, in honour of his father, Moïse funded the construction of the Maghen Abraham synagogue.
Beirut’s hopes
Maghen Abraham was not just a place of prayer. It was a major community institution that included a sports club and a soup kitchen (La Gout du Lait or the Taste of Milk).
It supported the 14,000 Jews who lived in the neighbourhood just next to the French colonial headquarters (the Grand Serail), now the office of Lebanon’s prime minister.
What put this neighbourhood at risk was not anti-Jewish sentiment in Lebanon but its location. As the Lebanese Civil War broke out in 1975, the frontline within Beirut ran right through the Wadi Abu Jamil.
At one point, in fact, fighters from the Palestinian Liberation Organisation guarded the synagogue. But there was no way to protect the Green Line, the divide between West and East Beirut.
In 1976, Joseph Farhi took the Maghen Abraham’s Torah to the safety of the Safra Bank (Geneva, Switzerland) and two years later, chief Rabbi Yacoub Chreim left Lebanon. That was when the synagogue closed. In 1982, when the Israelis invaded Lebanon, they bombed the synagogue from the air and from sea, and in fact, accelerated the departure of the Lebanese Jewish community from their homeland.
Eighteen years later, after an insurgency led by Hezbollah, Israel’s occupation of Lebanon finally ended. It was in this new period that the reconstruction of central Beirut began under a government-back consortium called Solidere.
In 2009, Rabbi Isaac Arazi, one of the leaders of Beirut’s Jewish community, expressed his joy when the renovation of the synagogue was included in the project.
Every single political group embraced the renovation. Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah said of the renovation, “This is a religious place of worship, and its restoration is welcome.” In fact, Hezbollah contributed financially to the rebuilding of the synagogue, which was completed just after 2014.
Around that time, I went to see Mohammed Afif, who was Hezbollah’s spokesperson, in a very modest office in Beirut’s Da’aheh neighbourhood. Afif told me that Hezbollah’s views on the synagogue and Lebanon’s Jewish population are always distorted: Hezbollah, he said, is not against Jews, only against Israel’s occupation of the Palestinians and its attacks on Lebanon.
When I told him I was from Calcutta, where the money came from for the original synagogue, he said to me with a smile, “Maybe get some money from there again to rebuild it.” Afif was assassinated in November 2024 by an Israeli bomb in Beirut’s Ras al-Nabaa area, not five minutes drive from the synagogue.
Vijay Prashad is the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is the editor of Letters to Palestine (2014) and his most recent book is (with Noam Chomsky), On Cuba (2024).
Follow him on X:Â @vijayprashad
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