This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
The paintings did not stay where they were found. Dura Europos itself had been abandoned since the third century, after a Sasanian siege overran the Roman garrison not long after the synagogue's own redecoration, and its ruins had lain buried in desert sand for some sixteen centuries by the time archaeologists reached them. Following the standard practice of major excavations of that era, the Yale and French Academy team removed the fragile wall paintings from the ruined building rather than leave them exposed to the desert climate, and the panels were reassembled, piece by piece, inside the National Museum of Damascus during the 1930s, where the reconstructed synagogue interior remains on display today.
That survival was tested again in the twenty first century. During the Syrian civil war, which endangered museums and archaeological sites across the country and saw the destruction of parts of the ancient city of Palmyra by armed groups, staff at the National Museum of Damascus hid a substantial portion of its holdings, reported at more than three hundred thousand objects, to protect them from looting and destruction. The Dura Europos synagogue paintings remained among the museum's protected holdings throughout the conflict and are still counted among its most significant exhibits, a set of ancient Jewish wall paintings that has now survived a Sasanian siege, sixteen centuries under the sand, and a modern civil war, far from the region where most of the world's other great illuminated Jewish artworks were made.