Syria May Allow All Jews to Leave Soon : Mideast: At least 200 have received exit permits recently. There is hope that Assad will keep his promise to Christopher.

At least 200 Syrian Jews have received exit permits in recent days, kindling hope in the Clinton Administration and the U.S. Jewish community that Syrian President Hafez Assad will keep his promise to allow his country’s Jewish citizens to leave by New Year’s Day or soon thereafter.

The flurry of exit visas covers almost one-quarter of the 850 Syrian Jews who previously had not been allowed to emigrate.

“There has been confirmation of at least 200 permits,” said Bluma Zuckerbrot, director of Middle Eastern affairs for the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith. “So they are definitely on their way” to allowing all remaining Jews to depart.

“We can’t be sure that Assad will live up to his promise, but we are hoping he will,” Zuckerbrot said. “Early indications would suggest that.”

Virtually all of the Syrian Jews who choose to emigrate are expected to settle in the United States--most of them in Brooklyn, where about 35,000 people of Syrian Jewish heritage already live, Zuckerbrot said.

“The community in Brooklyn is very well established,” Zuckerbrot explained. “The infrastructure for absorption--schools, hospitals and synagogues--is in place.”

A State Department official declined to discuss the matter in detail, saying the situation is the subject of sensitive diplomatic contacts. But he said: “We’ve seen some progress” recently.

In a surprise goodwill gesture, Assad told Secretary of State Warren Christopher this month that all remaining Syrian Jews would be given permission to emigrate by the end of the year.

For years, the Israeli government has accused Syria of holding its Jewish population as hostages in the Arab-Israeli conflict. The United States has avoided such inflammatory language, at least in public, but Washington considers emigration to be a basic human right, and U.S. officials raise the issue of Syrian Jews every time they meet Assad.

In April, 1992, Assad also promised to release all Jews who wanted to leave. About 2,600 people--more than two-thirds of the Syrian Jewish community--took advantage of the open door before it was abruptly closed again in October, 1992.

Because the earlier permission to emigrate was so abruptly terminated, U.S. officials were reluctant to claim success in the latest round of departures until all of the exit permits are actually issued.

The U.S. Embassy in Damascus estimates that about 1,220 Jews currently live in Syria. At the time Assad made his promise, about 370 people already had obtained exit permits that they had not yet used, leaving about 850 to be processed.

Since April, 1992, the U.S. Embassy in Damascus has issued 2,963 U.S. entry visas to Syrian citizens, a figure almost identical to the number of exit permits issued by the Syrian government.

Despite the cautious optimism that all Syrian Jews may finally be free to leave, Judy Feld Carr of Toronto, chairwoman of the Canadian National Task Force for Syrian Jews, said she has received disturbing reports that in some cases, one or two members of a family--usually children--were denied exit permits while other family members received them.

“Some full families got exit permits, but some others got permits for all of the children with the exception of one,” Carr said. “They were told to come back in 10 days and they would talk about it again. I don’t want to sound negative, but I am praying, because these people won’t leave a child behind.”

In the past, the Syrian government has often withheld exit permits from part of a family.