The rescue of Syrian Jews, now issued in paperback

If anyone had told an Ontarian housewife that she was going to mastermind a rescue mission of Jews from the Middle East, she would have had trouble believing them. Canadian Jewish News reviews Harold Troper's amazing story of the exploits of Judy Feld Carr, now issued in paperback under the title The rescuer.

TORONTO — The “Syrian” room in Judy Feld Carr’s downtown condominium is a testament to the 3,228 Jews she helped escape from that country over a 28-year period.

Handmade brass ornaments, a brass and glass coffee table, a music box, a plaque of the Ten Commandments laid out on mother-of-pearl, and pictures of Syrian-Jewish families with daughters named Judy, are all gifts from the families she helped save.

It has been about six years since she took out her last family on Sept. 11, 2001, and almost 10 years since Harold Troper, author and professor in the department of theory and policy studies at Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), wrote The Ransomed of God, the story of how Feld Carr navigated the escape of Syrian Jews.

That book was re-released in soft cover this fall with a new name, The Rescuer, and a new preface, in which he writes that after giving a talk when the book was first released, a man asked him which parts of the book were true and which were Troper’s invention.

He told the man that everything was true, Troper writes, but admits that he, too, was “more than a little skeptical” when Feld Carr approached him about writing a book on that part of Syrian history.

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