By Pearl Markovitz | January 21, 2021
The sisterhood of Congregation Beth Aaron, headed by Debbie Sheffey and Gabriellle Silverberg, invited Dr. Michelle Sarna, wife of the UAE Chief Rabbi Yehuda Sarna, to address the community on Zoom this past Sunday evening, January 16. A large group of participants took advantage of this opportunity to hear what is actually happening on the ground across the world with Jewish residents in a Muslim country.
The Jewish presence in the UAE began long before the Abraham Accords were signed. In the 1970s, after the fortuitous discovery of an oil resource yielding enormous revenue, the leaders of the UAE, encompassing seven Gulf States, decided to establish a university to serve as a global educational center on equal footing with Cambridge and Oxford. Ten years ago, Rabbi Yehuda Sarna, executive director of the Bronfman Center at NYU, chaplain and professor at the Wagner School of Public Policy, together with his colleague and friend the Imam at NYU, was summoned by then-president of NYU John Sexton, with a proposal. Sexton said that since NYU was granted the opportunity to establish a global university in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the UAE, he wanted the two religious leaders to fly out and meet with faculty, staff and students. Their mission was to establish a tone of openness and tolerance within the international population at the university. And so began the periodic trips of the Sarnas to the UAE, long before their borders were opened to Jewish travelers.