In Dubai, a Jewish community has emerged that remains humble, welcoming, and sincere

Text and Photos by Ari Z. Zivotofsky and Ari Greenspan

Like many of our fellow travelers, we, too, were excited about the possibility of a peace treaty between Israel and Saudi Arabia, and wonder what the current normalization between the Saudis and Iran will portend.

We’d all heard the rumors about how for years the Jewish State has been in contact with Riyadh, and we would have liked to be able to travel on our Israeli passports to the vast oil-rich country where non-Islamic displays are currently forbidden. For now, though, we’re happy that we can travel to Dubai and the rest of the UAE and visit the small, nascent Jewish communities in the Emirates.

While Dubai is known for its opulence — the tallest, the biggest, the most expensive, the grandest, the deepest, the widest are the superlatives that describe this city — we were not there to see the shiny, fun, brash side of the country but to experience a unique phenomenon in the Jewish world today: the emergence of a new Jewish community smack in the middle of a Muslim-majority country. In the middle of this popular tourist destination — with its huge artificial islands, the most expensive hotel (7-star) in the world, the world’s tallest building, an indoor ski slope and the most visited mall on the globe with 1,200 stores and 50 million annual visitors — one can find solid evidence of a growing Jewish community: prepackaged OU-certified kosher meals.

Dubai is the largest of the seven emirates that make up the UAE, or United Arab Emirates, and its population is representative of the rest of these oil-rich lands: While there are approximately 10 million people living in the UAE, the Emiratis are actually only about 10 percent of that population, the other 90 percent are foreign citizens who work there. The Jewish population is probably a few hundred, although at any given time the Jewish presence can swell to several times that number due to the many tourists.

Our initial contact with the Dubai community was in 2019, before Covid and before anyone on the “outside” was even dreaming about the Abraham Accords. We had been invited to bake matzah for the first communal shemurah matzah bake in Dubai, although as this was before the peace accords, the Jews there were careful to keep a relatively low profile. And then, with international travel having ground to a halt in 2020 and 2021, we weren’t able to keep up the initial momentum. But we were thrilled to be invited back last year, and so a few weeks before Pesach, we found ourselves in a new, post-accords Dubai.