Riots after the partition vote

The vote on the partition plan for Palestine at the United Nations General Assembly, at the end of November, provokes demonstrations in every Arab capital. In Damascus, where the Jewish community had been established since Antiquity and occupied its own quarter of the old city, the crowds converge there in December.

Synagogues and community schools are invaded and ransacked, houses looted, residents injured. Torah scrolls are destroyed. The security forces intervene only belatedly.

These days open a period during which the Jews of Syria will be progressively stripped of their rights, leading to the decrees of the following year that will forbid them from traveling freely and selling their property.