After years of uncertainty amid Syria’s brutal civil war, the 1,700-year-old synagogue paintings of Dura Europos have been revealed intact — a miraculous survival of Jewish history once thought lost forever.
For nearly a decade, historian Jill Joshowitz had resigned herself to the possibility that she might never see the world’s oldest synagogue paintings she had spent years studying. Locked away in Damascus during Syria’s civil war, the ancient treasures of Dura Europos — a synagogue painted in 244 CE — seemed doomed to the fate of so many Jewish sites across the region: looted, bombarded, or forgotten.
But in a dramatic turn, Joshowitz joined the first Jewish delegation to Syria in over three decades — following the fall of the Assad regime — and discovered that the paintings not only survived, but had been preserved in their original arrangement, exactly as they once adorned the synagogue’s walls.
“It was just thrilling to see these paintings that I had studied and thought about for so long,” Joshowitz said, standing before towering frescoes of Moses at the burning bush, Samuel anointing King David, Abraham binding Isaac, and Mordechai led by Haman.
The delegation, led by Rabbi Asher Lopatin of the Jewish Federation of Ann Arbor and Joe Jajati, grandson of a Syrian Jewish community leader, entered Damascus in a convoy — greeted by curators and even Syrian soldiers, who themselves stood transfixed at the reawakened Jewish heritage before them.
The Dura Europos synagogue, buried under earth in antiquity and rediscovered by archaeologists in the 1930s, is the largest and earliest known collection of synagogue paintings in the world. That these biblical scenes survived centuries — and now, war — is seen by many as a symbol of Jewish endurance in lands once emptied of their Jewish communities.
For Israel and the Jewish world, the resurfacing of the paintings is more than archaeology. It is a warning and a reminder: Jewish heritage across the Middle East remains at risk from war, extremism, and erasure. What was nearly lost in Syria echoes the same dangers facing Jewish history in Iraq, Yemen, and beyond.
As access expands, Joshowitz hopes the paintings will be restored as one of the “crown jewels” of the National Museum in Damascus. “I hope that it’s going to inspire greater interest and accessibility — for Syrians, and for all the Jewish people,” she said.
The Dura Europos frescoes now stand as a living testament to Jewish survival against all odds — a fragile inheritance that demands global protection.
