Minority faith communities are undergoing great stress in today’s America. Over the past several months, Jewish cemeteries, synagogues, and even a Jewish museum have been vandalized across the country, while Jewish community centers have received a litany of bomb threats. One rabbi in Seattle, whose synagogue of 16 years was graffitied with such slogans as, “Holocaust is fake history,” remarked, “in my time, there’s been nothing like this.” Meanwhile, a number of mosques across the country, from Colorado to Michigan, have been threatened, vandalized, and even torched. Mosques across the country are now even being advised to set up security cameras and hire security guards in response to this disturbing trend. In the same vein, an active-shooter training was recently held in a suburban Baltimore mosque in response to these incidents. Clearly we are barreling down a slippery slope that can only end in disaster if it is unchecked at the highest levels of our society.
Though while the picture may be bleak for minorities across the country, not all hope is lost for our nation’s diverse faiths. In the face of this tension, fear, and angst, an interfaith spirit persists in many corners of America. It was in this light that on Friday, March 24, Ambassador Akbar Ahmed, the Ibn Khaldun Chair of Islamic Studies at American University, was invited to address Congregation B’nai Tzedek in Potomac, Md. as the synagogue’s first-ever Muslim speaker. Congregation B’nai Tzedek, a prominent Montgomery County Conservative synagogue, is led by founder Rabbi Stuart Weinblatt, who is also the current President of the Rabbinic Cabinet of the Jewish Federations of North America, “the central address of North American Jewry.”
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