UAE museum unveils Torah scroll that survived the Holocaust in tolerance push

By Bushra Shakhshir

DUBAI (Reuters) – A personal museum within the United Arab Emirates unveiled on Saturday a Torah scroll that survived the Holocaust, the most recent signal of what Israel and its new Arab allies describe as a brand new strategy to understanding Jewish historical past within the Center East.

Ahmed Obaid Al Mansoori, founding father of the Crossroads of Civilizations Museum in Dubai’s historic district, mentioned the show, unveiled for Worldwide Holocaust Remembrance Day would assist fight “huge denial” of the Holocaust within the area.

“For us peace is an entire peace,” Al Mansoori mentioned. “Many individuals have forgotten the Jews are a part of the area. So right here, we’re making an attempt to point out … the great days between the Jews and the Arabs previously.”

The scroll is on everlasting mortgage to the museum from the Memorial Scrolls Belief, which takes care of greater than 1,000 Czech scrolls saved from the Holocaust and later despatched to London.

“I lived within the Arab world after I was younger, and the time period Holocaust doesn’t exist … So it is a enormous step,” mentioned Edwin Shuker, an Iraqi-Jewish businessman and vice-president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, who facilitated the mortgage.

Israel has reached out to advertise understanding of Judaism amongst its new allies within the two years because the UAE and fellow Gulf state Bahrain, adopted by Morocco and Sudan, cast ties with it below U.S.-brokered pacts generally known as the Abraham Accords.

The historical past of the killing of six million Jews by Nazi Germany is little taught within the Arab world, the place some politicians say it was wrongly used to justify the creation of Israel in 1948 on the expense of Palestinian Arabs.

Within the years that adopted Israel institution, main Jewish communities that had existed for hundreds of years all through the Center East largely disappeared, with tons of of hundreds of Jews emigrating from Arab nations to the brand new state.

The Emirati embassy in Washington, in a Twitter put up earlier this month, mentioned the UAE would come with Holocaust training at colleges, the primary nation within the area to take action.

“It is essential to recollect what occurred. It is essential to ensure that it would by no means occur once more. And it is essential to face right here collectively, all of us, Israelis, Emiratis and others with a view to say: Not anymore,” Israeli ambassador to the UAE, Amir Hayek, informed Reuters on the sidelines of the museum occasion.

(Reporting by Bushra Shakhshir and Abdel Hadi Ramahi; Writing by Ghaida Ghantous; Enhancing by Peter Graff)