Until two years ago, Amitai Abouzaglo didn’t know about the Uighurs. Today, he’s leading an advocacy movement within the Jewish world on their behalf.
In 2018, Abouzaglo, then a Harvard University student, was invited to the Oslo Freedom Forum which discusses human rights and brings in activists from around the world. The conference changed his life.
Before that, he had been focusing on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A course Abouzaglo took during the conference focused on human rights in China and the general community rights within it.
Abouzaglo met Nori Terkel, a prominent Uighur American lawyer and human rights advocate.
At seder tables across the country this Passover, there will be an empty chair, not for the prophet Elijah, but for the Uyghur people.
Jewish groups protesting China’s ongoing genocide of the Uyghur and other Turkic peoples plan to take a page from the Soviet Jewry movement and ask Jews worldwide to include the Uyghurs in their prayers at the seder table next month – including placing an empty chair at the dinner table.
The groups, as part of a Uyghur Week of Action, will also distribute one-page inserts to be read during the seder linking the Biblical persecution of the Jews in Egypt to China’s persecution of the Uyghurs today, according to Justin Rudelson, a board member of the Uyghur Human Rights Project and the first American anthropologist to study the Uyghurs.