Beginning on the Passover holiday of 1992, the 4,000 remaining members of the Damascus Jewish community (Arabic Yehud ash-Sham), as well as the Aleppo community and the Jews of Qamishli, were permitted under the government of Hafez al-Assad to leave Syria provided they did not immigrate to Israel. Within a few months, thousands of Syrian Jews made their way to Brooklyn, with a few families choosing to go to France and Turkey. The majority settled in Brooklyn with the help of their kin in the Syrian Jewish community.