JERUSALEM (AP) – Half a year after the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain established diplomatic relations with Israel, discreet Jewish communities in the Arab Gulf states, which previously lived in the shadow of the Arab-Israeli conflict, are adopting a more public profile.
Kosher food is now available. Jewish holidays are celebrated openly. There is even an incipient religious court to resolve issues such as marriages and divorces.
“Slowly, slowly, it’s getting better,” said Ebrahim Nonoo, leader of the Jewish community in Bahrain, who recently organized an online celebration of the Purim holiday for Jews in the Arabian Gulf region.
Nonoo is among the founders of the Association of Jewish Communities in the Gulf, a new umbrella group for small Jewish populations in the six Arab monarchies of the Gulf Cooperation Council. Its goal is to gain greater acceptance of Jewish life in the region.
“It will only take a while to leak before we see a Jewish restaurant or a kosher restaurant popping up from somewhere,” said Nonoo, a former member of parliament in Bahrain.
Even a modest online meeting like the Purim celebration 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 hosts.
This changed with last year’s agreements between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, which brought thousands of Israeli tourists and businessmen to the region and led to an incipient Jewish weddings industry and other celebrations aimed at Israeli visitors. Officials from the Emirates and Bahrain launched a public relations campaign to cultivate their image as Muslim havens of inclusion and tolerance for Jews, in stark contrast to regional rivals Saudi Arabia and Iran.
“A door has been opened,” said Elie Abadie, the new senior rabbi at 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 Jewish tradition and culture.”
Lebanese-born Abadie, a member of the Association of Jewish Communities in the Gulf, said he was certain that the change was taking place in the Gulf, not just in the United Arab Emirates.
The association aims to provide support and services to small Jewish populations in Kuwait, Oman, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. This may 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 came to the region for business. Only Bahrain has a deeply rooted Jewish community. Its approximately 80 members are descendants of Iraqi Jews who arrived in the late 19th century in search of trade opportunities.
The Jewish community in the United Arab Emirates is the largest, with around 1,000 members. He is also one of the youngest, and Abadie said he needs to “start 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. Given the growing enthusiasm for Jewish life in the United Arab Emirates, Abadie said she hopes that “more of them will surface”.
Jewish communities flourished for centuries across the Islamic world. For long periods, they enjoyed protected status and, occasionally, as in medieval Muslim Andalusia, they prospered in a golden age of coexistence. Most of these communities disappeared after Israel was established in 1948, when hundreds of thousands of Jews were expelled or fled.
Given the large number of Palestinians, Lebanese, Egyptians and Pakistanis living in Arab Gulf countries, some Jews have been uncomfortable in recent years to share their religious identity in public. United Arab Emirates residence permits, for example, require candidates to declare their religion, and “Jew” is not an option.
Most Arab states have conditioned the normalization of diplomatic ties with Israel at the end of the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict, including the Israeli occupation of land that Palestinians seek for an independent state.
But recently, these attitudes have been eroded among some Arab leaders, even though hostility towards Israel – in part because of their policies towards Palestinians – persisted among their populations.
Arab Gulf monarchies have scattered remnants of Jewish communities from the past, said Jason Guberman, executive director of the American Sephardic Federation.
Saudi Arabia is home to sites that predate the advent of Islam in the 7th century, and Bahrain, Kuwait and Oman have ancient Jewish cemeteries. The Emirate of Ras al-Khaimah in the United Arab Emirates is home to a solitary Jewish tombstone, possibly a traveling merchant – like most Jews arriving in Dubai today.
“Jews have been in the Gulf for a long time and now it is a kind of return to that historical pattern of people coming to trade,” said Guberman, adding that it was “very exciting to see part of that pluralist past return from the Middle East. “
Jean Candiotte, a New York TV director who has been in Dubai for seven years, said the new atmosphere is liberating.
“We were a small family of Jews. We met in hidden ways and everyone thought they were the only ones, ”she 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 looks just the opposite,” she said. “I really feel that I can be myself here, participating more openly in Jewish ceremonies and celebrations. Jewish life here is becoming more like Jewish life anywhere else. “
Even so, this new reality remains fragile. Some countries were slow to change. Saudi Arabia and Qatar have long 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 blamed archenemy Iran, and officials fear that other Jewish and Israeli targets may be vulnerable. Many Jews in the region keep their religious identities a secret.
A Jewish businessman who has lived and worked in Oman for the past few decades said he is one of about 20 Jews living in the sultanate.
He said the country has a more tolerant approach to religious diversity than its neighbors, but still insists on anonymity because it is concerned about the repercussions of local authorities.
During the coronavirus pandemic, he said that Zoom Sabbath services organized by the Jewish Community of the Emirates on Friday nights were a lifeline for him. He said he hoped the new Gulf communal organization “would generate a sense of security to come out of the closet, so to speak.”
___
Associated Press writer Isabel DeBre in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, contributed to this report.