9 October 2026

Dr. Muna Abbas/ Jordan: Co-founder of ANECD, Advisory Board Member, and Executive Director of the Asfari Foundation

During my visit to Damascus in the summer of 2025, I walked along the alleys of Old Damascus. In one of the narrow streets branching off Tal el-Hajarah street in Al-Amin neighborhood, a statue of Virgin Mary caught my eye. I took a picture of the alley and the statue and sent it to Youssef Hajjar. He replied that he had spent his early childhood in those alleys and that his family home was not far.

I imagined him as a child wandering those alleyways with his curious blue eyes. I remembered a story he told us when he crossed a priest from the monastery who asked Youssef a question to test his intelligence. His answer impressed the priest, so he suggested to Youssef’s mother enrolling him in the monastery to learn and start his path to priesthood. From there, Youssef embarked on a rich life, a journey of learning, adventure, and discovery. A journey including numerous principled positions and fateful decisions, moving across experiences and cities as a steadfast man who believed in human dignity and the values ​​of justice and love. A journey where Beirut became a city of companions and friends, a place that shaped awareness, positions, and principles. Damascus remained the city of the soul where, as he once told me, he walks along its ancient streets like nowhere else.

But Yousef was not simply a man with a rich life story. He possessed a rare ability to turn what he had lived through into vision. He had a brilliant mind, an eye for opportunities where others might not see them, and a strategic way of thinking that connected people, events and decisions, always looking for what a moment might make possible for the future.

I miss, and we will all miss, this ability to see beyond the work immediately in front of us. He saw our commitment to our larger cause, the cause of early childhood, as much more than work within a particular sector or programme. He understood its connection to broader questions of human dignity and rights, of justice, and of the society we aspire to build. In every endeavour he took on, he saw a part of a much larger picture, quietly weaving threads between relationships, ideas, decisions and events, always creating for us a space in which hope could emerge.

Perhaps this was one of the most beautiful things we learned from him: not to lose sight of the bigger picture while immersed in the details; to always remember why we do what we do; and to remain faithful to an idea even when the road towards it is long.

(During the First Regional Forum of ANECD, Cairo, 2023)

Yousef’s personal life, with all the experiences, knowledge and friendships it carried, was inseparable from his work in the public sphere. He never separated what he had lived from what he believed in, nor knowledge from conviction, nor personal experience from the causes he cared about. He carried all of it with him, transforming it into meaning, conviction and action, and through it opened spaces where others could meet him, learn from him and be changed by him.

After his passing, these spaces will not be the same. We will miss his brilliant mind, his questions, and his ability to see a little further than the rest of us; to remind us that what we do today can be part of something much greater tomorrow. We will also miss his humanity, the warmth of his friendship, and the way he could turn a discussion into an idea, an idea into a possibility, and a possibility into hope.

Farewell to the roses that bloomed in the gardens of your soul, Youssef… the roses that bloomed in the gardens of Egypt.

You loved that song by Sheikh Imam, and you would sing it at our gatherings. It became a little ritual whenever we met, a moment we came to expect, smile at, and sing along with you. I never imagined that one day I would long to hear you sing it again, or that it would become one of those small, precious memories through which your presence remains with us.

Roses of love and devotion to an idea, and of faith in its justice,  roses you scattered as light upon our path and our hearts.

Farewell, Yousef.

You will remain in the streets you once walked, in the cities you loved, in the questions you left us, and in the threads you wove between people, ideas and causes.

And above all, you will remain in that space of hope that you opened for us.