Denver – Members of Casablanca’s Muslim community joined their Jewish brothers and sisters Monday to celebrate the beginning of the Jewish new year.
The Moroccan Plural Association organized a ceremony Monday evening at Casablanca’s Neve Shalom Synagogue in celebration of the important date. Several young Moroccan Muslims attended the festivities, gifting foods such as kosher cakes to their Jewish friends and neighbors.
The Moroccan Plural Association is an organization that strives to “work for diversity, living together” and sharing, the group said in a Facebook post. The association’s latest event was organized with the help of Neve Shalom rabbi Jacky Sebag. Sebag offered his Muslim guests jars of honey in return for their gifts, saying honey was a symbol of camaraderie and well-wishes for the new year.
“We offer you honey, because there is nothing sweeter than honey, and we hope that sweetness settles in hearts and minds and that Morocco continues on its good momentum,” he remarked during the event.
Sebag also commented that the Moroccan Plural Association’s event was a “one of a kind” initiative, and the first time a Moroccan association organized an event to offer the synagogue gifts during Rosh Hashanah.
President of the Moroccan Plural Association, Ahmed Ghayet, stated the organization motivated young people in several other cities throughout Morocco to follow suit, especially by bringing gifts and friendship to Jewish communities from Rabat to Oujda.
Ghayet concluded by stating that “Jews and Muslims in Morocco are brothers and live together,” and that despite “the vagaries of life,” his organization still wanted to make the effort to “wish a happy new year to our Moroccan Jewish compatriots, as a testimony of fraternity and closeness.”
