For Worldwide Girls’s Day March 8, devoted to the social, financial, cultural and political achievements of girls, we pay tribute to a exceptional community of Muslim and Jewish girls dedicated to selling peace and better understanding between their communities.
The Sisterhood of Salaam Shalom was based in the summertime of 2010 by Sheryl Olitzky and Atia Aftab, two girls who barely knew one another. “Salaam” and “Shalom” are the Arabic and Hebrew phrases for “peace.”
What Olitzky describes as her “aha” second got here throughout a 2010 journey to Auschwitz. “It had a big impact on me and I made a decision I wished to do one thing to do away with the hate.”
On returning dwelling to New Jersey, Olitzky known as an area mosque and stated, “I simply need to take a small group of Muslim and Jewish girls, deliver us collectively and allow us to construct relationships and affect the better group and cease hate towards one another and shield one another.”
The mosque linked Olitzky with Aftab, a widely known Muslim activist and adjunct professor at Rutgers College, the place she teaches Islamic regulation and jurisprudence, heads the college’s Middle for Islamic Life and is a member of the Rutgers College Board of Overseers that governs the Rutgers College Basis.
“We had a standard mission,” stated Aftab, who’s the sisterhood’s chair emeritus. “I as a Muslim lady who could be very lively in my group additionally felt that if somebody is extending a hand to me I ought to obtain that hand and we must always stroll collectively.”
The sisterhood started with 10 members and has grown to greater than 100 chapters consisting of over 2,500 girls in North America.” in line with Olitzky. “Girls enter the sisterhood as strangers…then they develop into pals after which they develop into sisters.”
The Sisterhood of Salaam Shalom is a nationwide community of Muslim and Jewish girls dedicated to “dwelling in concord and limiting acts of anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish sentiment.”
In 2019, the Sisterhood of Salaam Shalom was amongst 10 grassroots organizations from all over the world chosen for the Intercultural Innovation Award from the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations (UNAOC) and the BMW Group. The sisterhood was chosen from amongst greater than 1,200 candidates from 128 nations.
The fast escalation in anti-Semitic and Islamophobic incidents in recent times is the most important concern that members of the sisterhood face at this time, in line with Olitzky. “Thank God we now have one another, and when one among us will get just a little nervous or scared, the opposite one is lifting you up.”
“Our premise is that Muslim and Jewish communities share an over 1,400-year relationship and our spiritual communities face related challenges as minorities in America,” Aftab wrote in a 2020 weblog on the Sisterhood of Salaam Shalom web site. “Sheryl and I had been dedicated to our friendship and we knew from the start that if our group was based on battle it might not final. Muslims and Jews mustn’t see one another solely via the lens of latest politics.”
Actually, for members of the sisterhood, one of many key rules of the group is to chorus from speaking about Center East peace points earlier than attending to know one another.
All members are required to observe a curriculum, “and it’s solely on the level the place they will pay attention with their coronary heart that they enter into difficult conversations,” Olitzky says. “They could not nonetheless agree—and that’s OK—however they are going to see the world in another way.”
Thanks partially to the coaching that members and group co-leaders obtain, when controversial discussions do happen, they have an inclination to go surprisingly effectively.
“They’re very constructive,” says Olitzky. “We educate individuals to see the world via your sisters’ eyes—to know what they’re feeling earlier than they’re feeling it. When one among us is in ache, we’re in ache. When one among us is completely happy, we’re celebrating. And so it’s listening to their phrases as in the event that they’re yours and understanding their story and respecting it.”
“Muslim pals are likely to say, ‘Oh you’re assembly with Jewish individuals—does that imply you’re normalizing Israeli-Palestinian points?’” says Aftab. “This isn’t about that. That is about religion and when you could have constructed a relationship of peace and love and friendship with someone, you realize you possibly can discuss issues… So our concept is … let’s construct one relationship at a time and, you realize what, perhaps that may reverberate and peace will unfold.”
Being a part of minority communities additionally helps members get alongside. “The concept is that we’re distinctive in that we are attempting to retain our spiritual id amongst the bulk,” says Aftab. “We really feel like we now have that frequent form of problem of being a minority throughout the majority.”
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