Had someone predicted decades ago that Judy Feld Carr would help to smuggle an invaluable, centuries-old book out of Syria — to say nothing of delivering thousands of the country’s Jews from a dictatorship to freedom — “I’d tell you you’re mad,” the Toronto resident said in a telephone call in the waning days of 2024. “I taught the music of the Catholic church of the 14th century. If you could tell me how that [leads] to Syria, you’re better than me!”
Feld Carr utilized similarly colorful language when asked whether she has any Syrian heritage.
“Are you kidding? My father was from Russia, my mother was from Brooklyn, Ashkenazi, and I grew up in northern Canada,” she said.
Yet Feld Carr, a musicologist by training, became indispensable in facilitating the smuggling of the book, an artistic Hebrew manuscript of the Bible, from Syria to Canada and on to Israel in 1993.
This particular book was originally written in Italy in the 15th century. It was transferred to Spain shortly afterwards, but after the edict of expulsion the book made its way to the Ottoman Empire. It was sold among the communities of Jewish exiles and eventually ended up in Damascus.
It is one of twelve Hebrew manuscripts that have come to be known as the Damascus Keters. Today the Keters are part of the National Library of Israel’s permanent exhibition, “A Treasury of Words,” where culturally priceless works reside. The word keter is Hebrew for “crown.”
Feld Carr first learned of the Damascus Keter in July 1993 while in Jerusalem with her husband, Don Carr — the couple had an apartment in the city — when they met a curator at the Israel Museum as the renowned Aleppo Codex was being restored.
The curator asked Feld Carr if she knew about the Damascus Keter or had any ideas for getting it out of Syria. Feld Carr called Shlomo Gal, a senior Mossad official, at his home on a Friday afternoon. He berated her, urging her instead to continue bringing Syrian Jews to freedom. (Harold Troper’s 2007 book about her, The Rescuer: The Amazing True Story of How One Woman Helped Save the Jews of Syria, can also be found at the National Library.)
Feld Carr recalled that she heard “from my underground sources” that the Keter resided in a shul in Damascus. That launched her quest to bring it out of Syria, since she understood that the Jewish community there would soon be almost non-existent. “The issue was to find it and get it out. My husband said, ‘You’re crazy. How can you get it?’ That was July. In September, I had it,” Feld Carr said.
How did she do it? During two phone calls and subsequent e-mails, Feld Carr provided few names or details, but did say she worked her contacts in Canada’s foreign ministry and communicated with the Damascus Jewish community’s chief rabbi, Avraham Hamra. Feld Carr said she “paid nothing to anybody to get out the Keter.”
A Middle East specialist in the Canadian government agreed to be the conduit, she said. On a visit to Damascus, he passed Hamra on a street. Hamra surreptitiously handed off the Keter, and the man put it in his raincoat and continued on. The man then visited at least one other Arab country before returning to Canada, the Keter resting in a black shopping bag. Feld Carr went in November to Ottawa, where they met in the man’s office and then headed to lunch.
That’s when Feld Carr first saw the book and held it. It seemed too modest to be the heralded Keter. “I showed disappointment,” she conceded. “ ‘This is what it is?’ It was small” — about 11”x14” — “on the thinnest vellum paper.”
She went on to the Israeli embassy to see Itzhak Shelef, the ambassador. She didn’t have an appointment. He held the book and “was sobbing like a baby,” she recalled. “He said, ‘This may be the Damascus Keter.’”
Feld Carr flew back to Toronto and asked a photographer to come to her home to take pictures of the Keter — without a flash, outdoors. She mailed the photographs to the Israel Museum. After Gal saw the pictures, he “sent me a lovely written message that it was the Keter,” she said.
Hamra, on a visit to Toronto, visited Feld Carr. She gave him the Keter and urged him to donate it to the National Library when he moved to Israel in 1994, which he did.
The text of this particular keter is arranged in two columns, each with 36 lines. It features quadratic Sephardic script, with the text of the Masorah arranged in beautiful geometric patterns around the biblical text.
Interestingly, the Book of Esther is known here as the Book of Ahasuerus, named after the Persian king featured in the story (Xerxes, אחשורוש).
Hamra later sought to retrieve the Keter and took the case to court in Israel, but the decision in 2020 went in favor of the NLI. The dispute led Hamra to cut off contact with Feld Carr. Hamra died in 2021.
“He was like a brother — that’s how close we were,” she said. “I lost his friendship.”
Feld Carr said she has no regrets.
“The Keter is here for eternity, in terms of Jewish life,” she said. “The book is where it should be. It has to be in the library.”
Writer-editor Hillel Kuttler can be reached at [email protected].
