My first Iftar experience will be hard to top.

If you’re unfamiliar, Iftar is the festive evening meal Muslims eat to break the daily fast during the month of Ramadan. On Wednesday evening, I was honored to take part in an unforgettable Iftar, made more so by the venue and the historic nature of the gathering.

To start, the venue… in typical times, UJA's 59th Street headquarters operates a full-service conference center on our 7th floor, a bustling space for members of the Jewish community and beyond to convene. Meetings run from morning to night, and our in-house kosher kitchen serves breakfast, lunch, and dinner to many thousands of people each year.

All of that ended in March 2020 when Covid forced us to shut down all in-person events. And so, after more than a year of eerily empty halls, it was wonderful to see our conference center come back to life for the first time since the pandemic began, as a group of 25 people gathered for an Iftar dinner hosted by Israeli Acting Consul General Israel Nitzan.

That alone would have been reason to celebrate, but we were further blessed by notable participants whose attendance we couldn’t even have conceived when our conference center was last open: the Consuls General in New York from the United Arab Emirates, Morocco, and Kosovo.

The former Consul General of Israel, Dani Dayan, began the tradition of hosting an Iftar in New York in 2017, bringing together Muslim, Christian, and Jewish leaders. But this was the first such gathering since the historic Abraham Accords were signed by the U.A.E., Bahrain, Israel, and the U.S., opening the door for normalized relations with Sudan, Morocco, and Kosovo.

Many at the Iftar spoke movingly about what it meant for the children of Abraham to be breaking bread together. And though we were just 25 people, in our modest way we were actualizing the aspirations of the Abraham Accords Declaration: “...to promote interfaith and intercultural dialogue to advance a culture of peace among the three Abrahamic religions and all humanity... [and to] seek tolerance and respect for every person in order to make this world a place where all can enjoy a life of dignity and hope...”

A global pandemic powerfully reminds us that we live on a small and highly interconnected planet. And in a year of shared darkness, the Abraham Accords were a point of much-needed light and optimism. We pray that many additional countries will sign on, continuing the dramatically changing trajectory of Middle East relations.

Far closer to home, in our New York community, there’s so much more to be done to heal our own divides. But the path forward is the same here as in the Middle East — and it’s within our hands. We need to sit down at more and more tables, breaking bread together, learning who we are beyond our differences, “seek[ing] tolerance and respect for every person.”

Incredible to say, we can take inspiration from the Middle East…What a difference a year can make.

Shabbat shalom