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Featuring a mosque, church and synagogue, “the center will be a platform for learning and dialogue, a model of coexistence”
The United Arab Emirates recently opened a center housing a mosque, church and the Gulf state’s first official synagogue, aimed at promoting interfaith coexistence in the Muslim country.
Three chapels in one place, Abraham Family Home – inaugurated in the capital Abu Dhabi on Thursday – is the first of its kind.
“The center will be a platform for learning and dialogue, a model of coexistence,” its chairman, Mohammad Khalifa Mubarak, told AFP, Added: “Visitors are invited to participate in religious services, guided tours, celebrations and opportunities to explore their faith.”
The three chapels are of the same height and have the same external dimensions. The only other synagogue in the Gulf Arab region is in Bahrain, which also has a small Jewish community.
The Gulf Jewish Community Association praised the UAE for opening another house of worship in the region.
“We are particularly pleased to see another synagogue being built in the GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council),” it said in a statement. “have something very special About building synagogues in Muslim countries. ”
The UAE is the first Gulf state to normalize relations with Israel and the third Arab country to do so, after Egypt and Jordan.
The oil-rich Gulf state, which is home to a small but active Jewish community that usually prays in private, established diplomatic relations with Israel in 2020 as part of a US-brokered Abraham Accords that also saw the The country establishes diplomatic relations with Israel Bahrain and Morocco.
The Abraham Accords break with the long-standing pan-Arab policy of isolating Israel until it accepts Palestinian statehood.
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