Wednesday, October 03, 2007
The meal was organized by the Jewish students organization Hillel and the Muslim Students Association at McGill University.
Held at Hillel's Stanley St. headquarters, it marked the end of the Jewish holiday Sukkot, a seven-day harvest festival holiday that commemorates the 40 years Israelites spent in the desert living in temporary shelters, and the Muslim holiday Ramadan, which marks the ninth month of the Islamic calendar. It is the most sacred month of the year in Islam and is the month in which the Quran is believed to have been revealed to the Prophet Mohammed.
The timing of the two holidays happened to coincide this year - as it did three years ago, when Hillel member Erin Grunstein approached her Muslim classmate at Marianopolis College with the idea of organizing a merged holiday feast.
"This is not simply a gesture, said David Zvi Epstein, 20, a McGill student and a member of the Hillel executive.
"We don't know where we'll go from here, but it's certainly more than just food."
Sitting across from fellow McGill student Idil Issa, 23, a Muslim of Somali origin, in the makeshift sukkah (the outdoor hut in which meals are to be eaten during the Jewish holiday) erected by Hillel members in a narrow corridor of the building's courtyard, Epstein said it's not hard to find common ground with his Muslim peers.
"I feel a sense of companionship in the sense we're both attempting to follow religious law in a secular society," he said.
"That's a very unique thing that crosses religious bounds."
Religion, not politics, took precedence at the event; leaders of the Muslim and Jewish student groups presented brief primers on the traditions and history of the two holidays as their peers dug into a Middle Eastern menu of kebabs, hummus, pita and salads familiar to both cultures.
It didn't take much to get the two groups talking within the tight quarters of the sukkah, made up of a floor of sleeping bags and plastic tarps and a roof of bamboo and pine branches.
"At the end of the day politics are not that important," Issa said. "It's what you do with your own life your own personal action. On that level, everyone's an individual and you can interact with them on a personal level
The event was attended by students from McGill, Concordia University and the Universite de Montreal, and Dawson, Marianopolis and Vanier colleges.
Although Jewish students far outnumbered their Muslim counterparts, Ascher Berros, 25, a Jewish Universite de Montreal student of Moroccan origin, is confident the event laid the groundwork necessary for future co-operation.
"It's concrete contact - these are people whom we'll see again on campus, with whom we will maybe create projects," he said.
"It starts with one or two people and with the other events we'll create we'll touch 10, 20 people."
Source: Gazette, Oct 03, 2007