Minsk, Muslims, Shabbos in Boston

Shalom, Moisheniks around the globe!

First I just want to say how moved I am that there is a Moishe House in Minsk. My grandpa MOISHE (not kidding, that was his name) was from there, and as the legend goes, at age eight he and his sisters escaped in wheel barrows covered in hay. Somehow Grandpa Moishe and my great aunts made their way to a boat to America, where they met their dad and big bro who had come 6 years before. A bunch of the family stayed in Minsk, and though a few made aliya to Israel, most of them didn't make it, and died in various pogroms and anti-semetic persecution.

So to read that there is now Jews are building a vibrant community in Minsk - what a blessing! Though my biological family may not have survived there, it is awesome to know that the larger Moishe House family extends to the land of my roots. I hope to get to visit someday.

As Moishe House Minsk represents some sort of tikkun, or healing, for my family's Jewish experience of Minsk, here in New England, Moishe House Boston is creating a tikkun between the Jewish and Muslim communities. For a variety of complicated reasons I won't go into, Jewish Muslim relations in Boston have gone way downhill in the past few years. It has gotten to a point where many institutional Jewish leaders seem to equate the ethnically, racially, and ideologically diverse community of Muslims of Boston with Alcaida terrorists and suicide bombers.

Not surprisingly, this atmosphere makes it hard to create any kind of positive relationship, or live by the Biblical commandment - "Love the stranger, for you yourselves were stangers." For members of the Moishe House Boston community, who remember our own families' experience of intolerance and anti-semitism a few generations back, we felt we couldn't stand by while the Muslim community was treated with disrespect and even contempt.

So we started holding dialogues and joint community service projects, and even joined together to show interfaith support for a workers' rights campaign. On Friday night, we welcomed young leaders of the Muslim community into our home for Shabbat. We weren't sure how it would go over, but 75 or 80 people showed up, either to build relationships and share Shabbat with our Muslim friends. During dinner, we had a discussion where people asked each other questions about our respective Sabbath and religious practices. It was inspiring to see people just talking to each other, building relationships, becoming friends, and to see how excited our planning team was that the event was a success.

Having the Muslims to dinner is just one small step towards repairing Jewish Muslim relations in Boston, but hopefully we are serving as a model for our parents' generation and the institutional Jewish community to do the same. If vibrant Jewish life can return to Minsk, surely Jewish Muslim good will can return to Boston. I just hope it won't take as long!