JERUSALEM (AP) – Six months after the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain established diplomatic relations with Israel, discreet Jewish communities in the Gulf Arab states, who once lived in the shadow of the Arab-Israeli conflict, are taking on a more public profile.
Kosher food is now available. Jewish holidays are openly celebrated. There is even a fledgling religious court to resolve issues such as marriages and divorces.
“Slowly, slowly, it is improving,” said Ebrahim Nonoo, leader of Bahrain’s Jewish community who recently hosted an online celebration of the Purim holiday for Jews in the Arabian Gulf region.
Nonoo is a founding member of the Association of Gulf Jewish Communities, a new umbrella group for the small Jewish population of the Gulf Cooperation Council’s six Arab monarchies. Their goal is to gain greater acceptance of Jewish life in the region.
“It will be a while before we see a Jewish restaurant or a kosher restaurant popping up anywhere,” said Nonoo, a former member of Bahrain’s parliament.
Even a modest online gathering 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 the public sight for fear of insulting their Muslim hosts.
That changed with last year’s agreements between Israel and the UAE and Bahrain that brought thousands of Israeli tourists and business people to the region and sparked a fledgling industry of Jewish weddings and other celebrations aimed at Israeli visitors. The Emirati and Bahrain authorities have launched a public relations blitz 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 of the Emirates Jewish Council. “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 Gulf Jewish Communities, said he is confident the shift is taking place across the Gulf, not just in the UAE.
The association aims to provide support and services to the small Jewish population in Kuwait, Oman, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE. These can include kosher certifications for hotels, restaurants and food products, a rabbinic court, and pastoral counseling for religious events such as bar mitzvahs, circumcisions, and funerals.
Their small Jewish population is almost all made up of foreigners who came to the region on business. Only Bahrain has a rooted Jewish community. Its approximately 80 members are descendants of Iraqi Jews who arrived in the late 1800s in search of trade opportunities.
The UAE’s Jewish community is the largest, with an estimated 1,000 members. It’s also one of the newest, and Abadie said he has to “start things all over again.”
Only about 200 are active members of the community. The rest, like most Jews in Arab Gulf countries, remains unremarkable. Given the growing enthusiasm for Jewish life in the UAE, Abadie said he expects “more of them will come to light”.
Jewish communities have thrived throughout the Islamic world for centuries. They enjoyed protected status for a long time, and occasionally, as in medieval Muslim Andalusia, they thrived into a golden age of coexistence. Most of those communities disappeared after the founding 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 Arabian Gulf states, some Jews have felt uncomfortable in recent years about disclosing their religious identity. For example, residency permits in the UAE require applicants to state their religion, and “Jewish” is not an option.
Most Arab states have conditioned a normalization of diplomatic ties with Israel in ending the decades-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict, including the Israeli occupation of lands the Palestinians seek for an independent state.
But recently that attitude has eroded among some Arab leaders, even as hostility to Israel – in part because of its policies toward Palestinians – persisted among their populations.
Arab monarchies in the Gulf have a few scattered remnants of bygone Jewish communities, 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 UAE’s emirate of Ras al-Khaimah houses a lone Jewish tombstone, possibly belonging to a traveling merchant, like most Jews arriving in Dubai today.
“Jews have been in the Gulf for a long time, and now it’s sort of a return to this historical pattern of people wanting to trade,” said Guberman, adding that it was “very exciting to see some of this return to the pluralistic past of the Gulf. the Middle East. “
Jean Candiotte, a TV director from New York who has lived in Dubai for seven years, said the new atmosphere is liberating.
‘We used to be a small, small family of Jewish people. We would find each other in hidden ways and everyone thought they were the only one, ”she said. “We were sensitive to the fact that we were in a Muslim country and did not know if everyone was ready for us.”
“Now it feels quite the opposite,” she said. “I really feel like I can be myself here by attending more open ceremonies and Jewish celebrations. Jewish life here becomes more like Jewish life elsewhere. “
Yet this new reality remains fragile. Some countries have been slower to change. Saudi Arabia and Qatar have long been criticized for promoting anti-Semitic attitudes in textbooks.
Security remains a concern, as evidenced by the recent attack on an Israeli ship in the Persian Gulf. Israel blames nemesis Iran and officials fear other Jewish and Israeli targets may be vulnerable. Many Jews in the region keep their religious identity secret.
A Jewish businessman who has lived and worked in Oman for the past few decades said he is one of perhaps 20 Jews living in the sultanate.
He said the country has a more tolerant approach to religious diversity than its neighbors, but still insisted on anonymity as he was concerned about the repercussions from local officials.
During the coronavirus pandemic, he said Zoom Sabbath services, hosted by the Emirates Jewish Community on Friday night, were a lifeline for him. He said he hopes the new community organization in the Gulf will “generate, as it were, a sense of security to come out”.
Associated Press writer Isabel DeBre in Dubai, UAE, contributed to this report.