A Torah scroll that survived the Holocaust was unveiled on Saturday at a private museum in the UAE, the latest example of what Israel and its new Arab allies dubbed as a fresh way to identify Jewish history in the Middle East.
The display, revealed on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, will help challenge the “big denial” of the Holocaust in the area, according to Ahmed Obaid Al Mansoori, founder of the Crossroads of Civilizations Museum in Dubai’s historic district.
“For us, peace is complete peace,” Al Mansoori said. “Many people have forgotten the Jews are part of the region. So here, we’re trying to show … the good days between the Jews and the Arabs in the past.”
This historic scroll is granted on permanent loan to the Dubai Museum from the Memorial Scrolls Trust, which preserves over 1,000 Czech scrolls recovered from the Holocaust and transferred to Britain.
“I lived in the Arab world when I was young, and the term Holocaust does not exist … So, this is a huge step,” said Edwin Shuker, an Iraqi-Jewish businessman and vice-president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, who was behind the loan.
In the two years after the UAE and fellow Gulf state Bahrain formed ties with Israel, followed by Morocco and Sudan, through U.S.-brokered pacts known as the Abraham Accords, Israel has reached out to these countries in order foster understanding of Judaism among its new friends.
The history of Nazi Germany’s massacre of six million Jews is poorly taught in the Arab world, where some politicians claim, it was incorrectly utilised to justify the establishment of Israel in 1948, to the detriment of Palestinian Arabs.
In the years after Israel’s founding, major Jewish communities that had existed for centuries across the Middle East mostly vanished, with hundreds of thousands of Jews moving from Arab nations to the new state.
In a tweet earlier this month, the Emirati embassy in Washington announced that the UAE would incorporate Holocaust teaching in schools, making it the first government in the region to do so.
“It’s important to remember what happened. It’s important to make sure that it will never happen again. And it’s important to stand here together, all of us, Israelis, Emiratis and others, in order to say: Not anymore,” Israeli ambassador to the UAE, Amir Hayek, said on the sidelines of the museum event.
