Jews, Christians and Muslims Join Forces to Help Needy During Ramadan in Morocco
by Menachem Posner – Chabad.org
In what sounds like a page ripped out of novel, several dozen Muslim activists, a group of Jewish teens and a rabbi joined forces on Sunday in a number of Moroccan cities to supply 1,500 underprivileged Muslim families with food staples for the daily meal that marks the end of each daily fast during Ramadan.
The food packages were a three-way partnership organized by the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, founded and directed by Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein; Chabad-Lubavitch of Morocco; and the Mimouna Association, an organization of Moroccan Muslim students who work to preserve and promote the unique heritage of Morocco’s ancient Jewish community.
“We are privileged to help support Moroccans in need celebrate the holy month of Ramadan,” said Eckstein. “This inspiring joint initiative serves as a shining model of bridge building between Christians, Jews and Muslims, and shows that the world’s faith communities can unite around shared values to make a difference for good.”
Rabbi Levi Banon of Jeunesse Chabad Morocco led a group of teens from the local Chabad and volunteers from Mimouna to the poorest areas in the cities of Kenitra, Rabat and Sale to distribute the food.
“This is a beautiful display of how people from different faiths can get together to do something positive,” said Laziza Dalil, a member of Mimouna. “We are now two weeks into Ramadan, and some of these families may not have the most basic supplies with which to break the fast.”
Each box contains dates, tea, lentils, chickpeas and other food staples with which Muslims traditionally break their Ramadan fasts each evening.
This year’s distribution follows the successful pilot program last year, in which 250 packages were delivered. According to Dalil, some of the recipients were taken aback to discover that the gift was brought to them by people outside of the Muslim faith, but “they really did not care. They were touched by the human gesture of caring, and the fact that people thought about them and their families.”
“It was such a wonderful gesture that really brought out the best in people,” noted Banon. “It is touching to see that charity that has been done in other parts of the world though the IFCJ is now being felt in the Muslim world, especially beginning in Morocco, a country of tolerance and peace.”
Holy?
I’m not a Shliach and I don’t know firsthand all the rules, but it seems Ich that Rabbi Ekstein used the word “holy” month. Especially as the Mimouna person just says the name of the month without holy
Rabbi Ekstein
isn’t Chabad. (If that matters)
Wow
Amaizing rabbi Levi Banon is a great
Shliach
This is so great!
I really love seeing how people come together to help one another. :) Islamaphobia, or any other kind of fear of a different demographic is wrong, and ignorant. if you see someone without a smile, give ’em yours! :D
Pedant
Wow, your right nothing at all wrong with any demographic. No matter what may be wrong with or within the demographic, there is nothing ever wrong with it, because that is phobic and phobic is bad because it’s phobic and ignorant.
Pedant
Just further on this, I’ve been to Morroco numerous times and there are plenty of decent muslim people, the problem is that in fact the level of decency for an arbitrary muslim dude or dudette, at least in the not-a-threat-to-kill-anybody sense, is in fact inversely proportional to the degree of said dude or dudettes religious fervor.
Yes there are more moderate branches of the religion (as there have always been) but in 2016, they aren’t the dominate religious force in islam.
But yes, this is only obvious to the ignorant, by which we mean the well informed and historically grounded, observer.
Achdus!
This is true emeseh Ahavas Yisroel.
We can disagree while remaining calm and civil,
Even if she’s a gentile can still be your friend,
We are not the only way out there,
Live and let Live,
Tolerance,
Peace and Love!
cnl
What a waste!
Yisroel Avrahm
I disagre with the Rabbi on helping muslems. Muslems and Judaism cannot exist together. Muslems intorduced the world to hijaking, suacide bomings and to descieve the non-muslems. Muslems are making an effort to kill Jews all over this world, just like haman tried. Muslimes have declared openly that they want the entire world to be islamic.
Pedant
I spoke up earlier so I’ll speak up again:
You need to remember that islam or any religion other than Judaism is a superficial false consciousnesses, as it were.
All goyim are bnei noach and have a mission to fulfill and an opportunity to serve G-d and be rewarded for that.
And it is our obligation, as the Rebbe famously points out, to influence them to the utmost extent of our power to do so.
We need to keep that in mind when we speak of ‘muslims’ and ‘blacks’ and ….
Morocco is a muslim country, yes, and its muslim king and even more so his father have been famously good to and for the Jews. Morocco has been a haven for us.
Now being what it is, there are certainly those evil elements brewing there, but you may rest assured that Rabbi Banon knows good and well who he is and who he is not dealing with and knows the terrain much, much better than pretty much anybody else from afar.
I suggest intellectual humility and deference to the local experts, again you aren’t, here, dealing with wide eyed multi-culturists.