A possible legal feud is brewing between Syria and Israel over the ownership of 1,000-year-old Hebrew bibles that were taken out of Syria by Israeli spies 20 years ago, the Associated Press reported.
On Monday, Israel's national library requested that a court grant it custodianship and establish a public trust for the Crowns of Damascus, nine Hebrew bibles hand-written in Italy and Spain some 700 to 1,000 years ago. The leather-bound tomes were guarded for centuries in synagogues in the Syrian capital Damascus and were only used for special occasions, the AP reported.
Things changed when Syria relaxed restrictions on Jews leaving the country in the early '90s. Many Jews emigrated, but they were not allowed to take the leather-bound Hebrew texts with them.
Beginning in 1993, with the help of a Damascus rabbi named Avraham Hamra, Israel's intelligence agency Mossad snuck the books out of Syria. All of the texts arrived in Jerusalem by 1995, but it wasn't until 2000 when the Jewish nation revealed their locations, the AP reported.
The National Library of Israel is now seeking to make its custodianship of the Crowns of Damascus official, saying it has the ability to preserve them in an air-controlled environment and that they would not be safe in civil war-torn Syria.
But Hamra, former leader of the Damascus Jewish community, said he may dispute the legal request on the grounds they are the cultural property of Syrian Jews, the AP reported.
"It is not my property, but it is the property of my community," said Hamra, who now lives in Israel.
The library promised to transfer the bibles to a Syrian Jewish heritage center that Hamra plans on building in Israel, the rabbi said, citing a catalog from a 2000 exhibition featuring the bibles, which he claims mentions the promise.
Hamra has yet to build the heritage center. The library said no such promise was ever made.
A lawyer for the national library says the library is ready to publish advertisements in international newspapers to let others who object to come forward.
