Hamra and the head of the community council, an aged figure named Selim Totah, worked with a young New Yorker named Stephen Shalom to rig up a mass "proxy marriage" last year that enabled 14 Jewish girls to emigrate to New York.

Hamra and Totah prepared the list of eligible girls who could find no eligible boys in Syria – most of the young men have escaped – while Shalom rounded up from a large Syrian Jewish community in Brooklyn 14 males who agreed to propose to girls they had never seen.

Although everybody involved knew most of the marriages would never take place, the gambit did entice the Syrians to let the girls leave for America. Two have returned to Damascus, having found New York too bewildering and foreign.

In fact, there were elements of charade throughout the entire venture. Last May, when President Carter met Assad, the world was treated to the spectacle of the two chiefs of state "conferring" about the marriage proposals.

The Syrians were rigorous as to form. Before the girls were allowed to leave, the Syrians demanded assurance that the husbands were of good family and able to provide for their new wives.

In each case, the marriage petition had to be notarized, the notary's stamp then had to be notarized once more by the secretary of state of the State of New York, whose signature in turn had to be authenticated by U.S. Secretary of State Cyrus R. Vance.

"The packet that we finally got on each person was about that thick," one embassy official recalls, holding apart his thumb and index finger to the thickness of a healthy suburban telephone book.

There are some indications that the Americans might have extracted more action from the Syrians on Jewish emigration, but the opportunity slid by.

During Carter's campaign, Assad was said to be willing to let out most of the Jews, quietly and gradually, in much the same manner as the neighboring hard-line Iraqis had done only a few years before.

By the time Carter was inaugurated and Assad met Vance, the most Assad would commit himself to was a "case by case review" of Jewish emigration petitions.

By the time Carter met Assad last May, the focus had shifted to the 14 girls, with hints that some other individual "family reunification" petitions might be looked at kindly.

Despite the apparent Syrian retrenchment, the case of the 14 "marriages" is looked at here as something of a breakthrough.

It leads Hamra to ask these days of every American Jew who is able to visit the quarter: "Are you married?"

And he is working on a new list of 50 girls, among the 1,000 who remain unmarried, to submit to the Syrian government.

The marriage gambit, of course, he can talk about. Most of the other cases and methods of leaving Syria he cannot talk about at all.

There is the case of the 90-year-old woman who walked for two days straight last month to escape with 13 others.

There is the case of the doctor who forfeited his $6,000 bond and a personal fortune said to be 30 times that amount rather than return at the end of his temporary emigration period.

There is the case of the old rabbi from Kamishli who left Syria under obscure circumstances last year. His departure left Hamra the only rabbi in Syria.

Now, the last of Kamishli's kosher butchers has escaped and meat prepared under Jewish dietary laws must be shipped from Damascus.

Hamra acknowledges that the community is losing vital pieces every month. He is not worried.