It was past sunset when we pulled up to the Moses Ben Maimon Synagogue in Abu Dhabi. The darkening sky provided a stark contrast to the gleaming white criss-crossing beams that rose like a canopy up to the roof in front of us. It was Wednesday night, the first night of Passover, and the synagogue had only been open since March.
Our Pakistani cab driver, who had ushered my husband Geoff, eight-year-old son Max and I from our hotel, had not yet taken anyone to the synagogue before – and was a bit concerned, on our behalf. Are you sure this is the right place? He kept asking. It says the place is closed. Are you sure you have the right time? I can wait here, just to make sure.
But inside the Moses Ben Maimon synagogue, the first synagogue to be built in 100 years in the Gulf, lights were glowing, a menorah lit up.
“We are in the right place, thank you,” I said.
For many decades — with no official synagogue — Jews in the UAE gathered discreetly in houses or hotels, to pray and tell the story of Passover. Some expats and Jews didn’t always feel safe, openly expressing their Jewishness. So to now be celebrating Passover in a synagogue, whose opening was attended and celebrated by UAE government officials, was the very definition of getting out of mitzrayim: into the openness.
(The writer's son, Max, in front of the Moses Ben Maimon synagogue sign, the first synagogue to open in the Gulf in 100 years. Photo by Rebecca Meiser)
As we entered the synagogue, my husband, son and I were ushered to our table. It was clothed in white, laden with pink and green flowers, and an overflowing seder plate. There were bottles of Kedem grape juice on every table (this being Ramadan in a Muslim country, there was no wine) and water bottles bearing the label of Aloft Hotels. In the courtyard, kids games were set up: oversized building blocks of Legos, a huge game of Connect Four, a chess board.
And my son, a third grader who attends Joseph and Florence Mandel Jewish Day School — who can be reticent in the best of times — jumped into a game of hopscotch with two boys from Israel who did not speak English. But the language of games is universal, no translation needed.
My family and I were seated at a table with two Israeli couples who had traveled together from a city outside Tel Aviv to be here. They wanted a break, they said, from the frenzy that can be Passover in Israel. And ever since the Abraham Accords, which were signed in 2020 and normalized ties between the UAE, Bahrain and Israel, thousands of Jews have been coming to Abu Dhabi for vacations, including our tablemates Teachi and Meirav.
For months, though, the two families had been searching for a place to go for seder in Abu Dhabi without any luck. Then, this morning, when they had just about given up, they got a call back from the administration at Moses Ben Maimon Synagogue. One more table had been squeezed into the courtyard to accompany them. “It’s a miracle,” says Meirav.
So much of this night was a miracle. I went up to introduce myself to Rabbi Yehuda Sarna, the Montreal-born, chief rabbi of the synagogue.
“Ahhh, the writer from Cleveland,” he says. Rabbi Sarna, is known for his welcomeness and hospitality (and also for studying the guest list).
(Celebrating Passover under the bright light of the menorah. Photo by Rebecca Meiser)
Rabbi Sarna who also serves as the executive director of the Bronfman Center for Jewish Student Life at New York University, became the chief rabbi of The UAE in 2019.
“Talk about Passover’s theme of freedom,” I said to the rabbi. “Who would have thought that 10 years ago, we would be here celebrating this way?”
His 11-year-old son loyally butts in and points at his dad. “He did,” he says. “He thought so.”
I started to mention this being an effect of the Abraham Accords, but Rabbi Sarna shakes his head. “This,” he says, looking around the synagogue, “has nothing to do with the Abraham Accords. It is all because of the year of tolerance.”
Four years ago, The UAE, under the leadership of Sheik Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, the president of the United Arab Emirates and ruler of Abu Dhab, declared 2019 to be The Year of Tolerance in the UAE, an initiative aimed to promote the values of tolerance, coexistence, and peace in the region. Sheik Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, known for his global savviness and for heading up a socially liberal autocracy, was said to have inherited his pluralistic ideologies from his father.
According to The New York Times, MBZ’s father, Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan, who founded the UAE, believed that “we are all God’s children” — and allowed Christians to build churches in Abu Dhabi, disregarding a commonly held Muslim precedent that no other religion should have a presence on the Gulf.
Then, 2019 was capped by a historic global event, the visit of Pope Francis to the Gulf region. It was the first time a pope had ever visited the Arabian peninsula. Pope Francis hosted a mass for 180,000 Catholics in Abu Dhabi — and the visit led to the signing of the historic Abu Dhabi Declaration “A Document on Human Fraternity for World Peace and Living Together” in the presence of the UAE's political leaders.
It was during this year that the idea for the Abrahamic Family House (different houses of worship, all sharing one multi-faith campus in Abu Dhabi) was born.
“Dad,” the rabbi’s son says, “tell her the story of how the Moses Ben Maimon Synagogue came about. It’s one of my favorites,” he says.
Rabbi Sarna obliged. Originally, Sarna explained, there were discussions that only a mosque and a church would be built on the site. But when Sheik Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan heard these plans, he intervened. Absolutely not, he said. Abraham was a prophet to three different religions. We cannot forget the Jews.
And so the Abrahamic Family House — of which the Moses Ben Maimon Synagogue sits — was created. At a time when the world finds itself divided by religion, having a synagogue, mosque and church all in one site, all the same size (each building is a 30 meter by 30 meter cube), was an attempt to show in physical form that unity is possible.
And so the dream began.
Our table’s Haggadah reading (the telling of the story of Passover) was a mishmash of English and Hebrew. Teachi, one of the Israeli dads at our table, presided over the seder, by default. We were never quite sure what page we are on. It didn’t matter.The story of Passover is as familiar as a song.
And then it was time for the singing of Dayenu, the song of gratitude. “Dayenu means it would have been enough,” Sarna said. Standing in the middle of the room, dressed in a long white robe, in front of 130 Jews from around the world, in the first synagogue to open in the Middle East in 100 years, Sarna invited everyone to think about the word Dayenu, and what it meant to each of us.
And as the whole room began to sing, you could almost feel the words cascade upwards, into the night sky.
After dinner, my husband and I run into a young, recently married couple Ari Brenner and Lauren Dahar, who moved to Israel nine months ago and who knew Rabbi Sarna from their years in New York. We are so used to hearing about people who came here from Israel, from London, from Australia. So we almost didn’t compute, when Lauren tells us she is originally from Solon. My husband, who also grew up there, quickly exchange geographical questions, establishing that they lived only a few streets away from each other.
(Solon natives Lauren Dahar originally of Solon and husband Ari Brenner were one of 130 Jews from around the world celebrating Passover in Abu Dhabi. Photo by Rebecca Meiser)
Lauren and Ari are here, tonight, at the invitation of Rabbi Sarna. They’d been to two other seders of his, at his home in New York, before, and when he asked them if they wanted to come to this historic one, they booked a plane ticket. “Rabbi Sarna is amazing at connecting a lot of interesting people — it’s the through line that connects them all,” Lauren says.
For both Lauren and Ari, the experience of being at the seder was almost dreamlike. “I keep looking up at the menorah,” Ari says. In Talmudic times, menorahs were supposed to be positioned at the front of the door, facing the street – in order that everyone passing by can see it. But in places where Jews were scared to reveal their identities, menorahs were purposely indoors. Tonight, a seven-branched menorah –a symbol of the Jewish people, was lit up on a white column above our tables. It beams throughout the surrounding area like a beacon.
Just as amazing is the box of matzah that sits on every table. The super thin round matzah itself is brown and burnt. But more extraordinary, as Lauren points out, is that it is served in a white boxes, with covers containing Passover greetings from The Emirates. “It’s pretty incredible to see those words,” she says
After dinner, a lavish buffet of surprisingly tasty barbecued chicken, fish, leafy salads, pumpkin soup, fries, and spongey chocolate kosher-for-Passover cake, it is time for the finding of the Afikomen (a piece of matzah that is broken and hidden during the seder. Traditionally, children are tasked with the searching of it). At our table, Teachi has hidden it, very meta-like, in the original box of matzah it came in. The kids scramble under the table and lift up our plates, trying to find it. But Max, who is somewhat of an expert at the game hide and seek, peeks into the box, and pulls it out. His face lights up like the menorah. Geoff offers him 10 dirhim, which is about $3.67 in U.S. dollars, but Max is thrilled by the crispness and newness of the bill.
After the eating of the afikomen, Rabbi Sarna takes the floor again. At Passover, he says, “every person has to see themselves as if the story was about you. Tonight’s experience was your story. It’s our story,” he said, eyes looking out over the remaining guests who had stayed to linger, refilling their glasses of grape juice.
And as the night came to a close, he invited everyone “to take some of this story with you, as we write the next chapter all together.”
The UAE has a motto that “everything is possible, even the impossible.” In this time of rising global anti-semitism, to be celebrating openly and proudly at the first synagogue to open in the Gulf in 100 years, well, it felt like, everything truly was possible. And that perhaps Abraham, acclaimed as a model of reconciliation, might still be influencing things here from his grave.
With Rabbi Sarna’s closing words, my family and I shuffled out of the synagogue, into the vast openness of the night.