[ad_1]
Dubai: The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has opened a center with a mosque, church and the country’s first official synagogue, aimed at promoting interfaith coexistence in the Muslim country.
The oil-rich Gulf federation, which normalized relations with Israel in 2020, has a small but active Jewish community that usually prays in private.
The Abraham Family House, which opened Thursday in the capital Abu Dhabi, has three houses of worship on the same site and is the first building of its kind.
“The center will be a platform for learning and dialogue, a model of coexistence,” said its chairman, Mohammad Khalifa Mubarak.
“Visitors are invited to participate in religious services, guided tours, celebrations and opportunities to explore their faith,” he said in a statement Friday.
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. “There is something very special about building a synagogue in a Muslim country.”
The 2020 normalization of relations between the UAE and Israel is part of the US-brokered Abraham Accords, which also saw the Jewish state establish diplomatic ties with Bahrain and Morocco.
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 agreement breaks with a long-standing pan-Arab policy of isolating Israel until it withdraws from the occupied territories and accepts Palestinian statehood.
[ad_2]
Source link
