JERUSALEM (AP) – Half a year after the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain established diplomatic relations with Israel, the discreet Jewish communities in the Arab Gulf states that once lived in the shadow of the Arab-Israeli conflict have adopted a more public profile .
Kosher food is already available. Jewish holidays are celebrated openly. There is even an incipient religious court to resolve issues such as marriages and divorces.
“Slowly, slowly, it got better,” said Ebrahim Nonoo, leader of Bahrain’s Jewish community, which recently hosted an online celebration of the Purim holiday for Jews in the Arab Gulf region.
Nonoo is one of the founders of the Association of Jewish Gulf Communities, a new umbrella group for the tiny Jewish populations of the six Arab monarchies of the Gulf Cooperation Council. Its goal is to achieve greater acceptance of Jewish life in the region.
“It will only take us a while to filter out before we see a Jewish restaurant or a kosher restaurant emerge from somewhere,” said Nonoo, a former member of parliament for Bahrain.
Even a modest online meeting like the celebration of Purim would have been unthinkable a few years ago, when relations with Israel were taboo and Jews kept their identities out of public view for fear of offending their Muslim guests.
That changed with last year’s agreements between Israel, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, which brought thousands of Israeli tourists and businessmen to the region and sparked an fledgling industry of Jewish weddings and other celebrations aimed at Israeli visitors. Emirati and Bahraini authorities have launched a public relations deal to cultivate their image of Muslim paradises of Jewish inclusion and tolerance, in contrast to regional rivals Saudi Arabia and Iran.
“A door has opened,” said Elie Abadie, the new senior rabbi of the Jewish Council of the Emirates. “I think there is more openness and more welcome and enthusiasm for the presence of a Jewish community or Jewish individuals or of Jewish tradition and culture.”
Lebanon-born Abadie, a member of the Association of Jewish Gulf Communities, said he is confident the change is taking place across the Gulf, not just in the UAE.
The association aims to provide support and services to the small Jewish populations of Kuwait, Oman, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. They can include kosher certifications for hotels, restaurants and food products, a rabbinical court, and pastoral guidance for religious events such as bar mitzvahs, circumcisions, and burials.
Its tiny Jewish populations are almost all made up of foreign nationals who have come to the region on business. Only Bahrain has a deep-rooted Jewish community. Its nearly eighty members are descendants of Iraqi Jews who arrived in the late 19th century looking for opportunities in trade.
The Jewish community in the United Arab Emirates is the largest, with approximately 1,000 members. He’s also one of the newest and Abadie said he has to “start things from scratch”.
Only about 200 are active members of the community. The rest, like most Jews in the Arab Gulf states, maintain a low profile. Faced with growing enthusiasm for Jewish life in the UAE, Abadie said he hopes “more of them will come to light.”
Jewish communities had flourished for centuries throughout the Islamic world. For long periods they enjoyed a protected state and, from time to time, as in medieval Muslim Andalusia, they prospered in a golden age of coexistence. Most of these communities disappeared after the establishment of Israel in 1948, when hundreds of thousands of Jews were expelled or fled.
Given the large number of Palestinians, Lebanese, Egyptians and Pakistanis living in the Arab Gulf countries, some Jews have been uncomfortable in recent years in sharing their religious identity in public. Residence permits in the UAE, for example, require applicants to indicate their religion and it is not a “Jewish” option.
Most Arab states have conditioned the normalization of diplomatic ties with Israel to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for decades, including the Israeli occupation of land that Palestinians seek to obtain an independent state.
But recently, these attitudes have eroded among some Arab leaders, even as hostility toward Israel, in part because of its policies toward the Palestinians, has persisted among its populations.
Gulf Arab monarchies have some scattered remnants of past Jewish communities, said Jason Guberman, executive director of the American Sephardic Federation.
In Saudi Arabia are sites prior to the emergence of Islam in the seventh century, and Bahrain, Kuwait, and Oman have ancient Jewish cemeteries. The UAE emirate of Ras al-Khaimah is home to a lone Jewish tombstone, possibly of a peddler, like most Jews arriving in Dubai today.
“Jews have been in the Gulf for a long time, and now it’s kind of a return to that historical pattern of people who came to trade,” Guberman said, adding that it was “very exciting to see part of this return of the pluralistic past of the Middle East ”.
Jean Candiotte, a New York television director who has been in Dubai for seven years, said the new atmosphere is liberating.
“We used to be this small, small family of Jews. We would meet in secret and everyone thought they were the only one, “he said.” We were sensitive to the fact that we were in a Muslim country and we didn’t know if everyone was ready for us. “
“Now it feels just the opposite,” he said. “I really feel like I can be here myself, attending Jewish ceremonies and celebrations more openly. Jewish life here is more like Jewish life anywhere else. ”
Still, this new reality remains fragile. Some countries have changed more slowly. For a long time, Saudi Arabia and Qatar have been criticized for promoting anti-Semitic attitudes in textbooks.
Security remains a concern, as illustrated by the recent attack on an Israeli-owned ship in the Persian Gulf. Israel has blamed archenemy Iran, and officials fear other Jewish and Israeli targets may be vulnerable. Many Jews in the region keep their religious identities secret.
A Jewish businessman who has lived and worked in Oman for the past few decades said he is one of 20 Jews living in the sultanate.
He said the country has a more tolerant approach to religious diversity than its neighbors, but insisted on anonymity because he was concerned about the repercussions of local officials.
During the coronavirus pandemic, he said Zoom Sabbath services organized by the UAE Jewish community on Friday evenings have been a salvation for him. He said he hopes the new Gulf communal organization “generates a sense of security to get out of the closet, so to speak.”
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Associated Press writer Isabel DeBre in Dubai, UAE, contributed to this report.