In an unmarked villa, nestled amid homes in an upscale Dubai neighborhood, a congregation prays in the first fully functioning synagogue in the Arabian Peninsula in decades.
Though its members keep its precise location secret, the synagogue’s existence and the tacit approval it has received from this Islamic sheikhdom represent a slow rebirth of a burgeoning Jewish community in the Persian Gulf, uprooted over the decades after the creation of Israel.
The United Arab Emirates’ rulers have sought to boost the community by hosting interfaith events and pledging to build a massive multi-faith complex that includes a synagogue, part of their efforts to burnish the country’s image to the West. Meanwhile, ties between Gulf Arab states and Israel slowly warm over their mutual enmity of Iran, though concerns about the future of the Palestinians remain a wedge.
Yet even with the challenges, leaders of the Dubai congregation say they represent a new, growing presence that could offer a hopeful glimpse into the future.
“We have slowly found our place in the ecosystem of the UAE,” Ross Kriel, the president of the new Jewish Community of the Emirates, told The Associated Press. “It reflects our optimism about the future of the UAE as a place for us to commune, contribute and flourish.”
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Thriving Jewish communities in the region once stretched from the neighborhoods of Baghdad and Tehran down to the island nation of Bahrain, and from the eastern coast of Oman, home to a purported tomb of the Prophet Job, to Yemen’s southern shores. But the war surrounding the 1948 creation of Israel, and the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees it generated, saw both Arab rulers and their public turn against their Jewish neighbors. Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution also saw Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who acknowledged Israel, replaced by a Shiite theocracy that views the state of Israel as an enemy, with tens of thousands of Jews fleeing.
Global News 
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