This past Friday, Brooklyn’s Palestinian-owned restaurant Ayat in Ditmas Park brought hundreds of Jews, Arabs, and others together for a shabbat dinner where they collectively mourned the lives that have been lost as a result of the Israeli-Palestinian war and occupation.
Several diners said that they came to the event in hopes of making a connection with people of varying backgrounds amidst the heightened regional tensions between Israelis and Palestinians. Those who attended ate, sang, talked, and prayed past midnight- displaying a significant moment of unity in a city where there is much ethnic and religious division as a byproduct of the war and ongoing conflict.
“The whole idea of the event is to bring people together,” said a co-owner of Ayat, Abdul Elenani, 31, who picked up what he said was a $40,000 bill as a thanks to those who have continued supporting his restaurant after it was bombarded with one-star reviews following the Hamas attack on Oct. 7. “F— the politics. Let’s talk about life. Let’s talk about each other.”
The dinner had a fusion of options as Tupperware with Arabic sweets were passed around while diners each broke off a piece of the 6-foot-long loaf of challah.
Dozens of Jewish volunteers showed out to the event to help, printing out handouts of Torah passages, singing sections in Hebrew, and making sure to bring kosher food and have tech-free zones for those who were keeping Shabbos.
Michael Hirschhorn, 64, from Prospect Heights, said he was looking for “any light in the dark.”
Before the dinner began at 9 p.m., over 100 people- including women with hijabs and men wearing yamakas- gathered in a white popup tent on the sidewalk for a traditional Jewish prayer service.
The pre-dinner service ended with attendees reciting Mourner’s Kaddish, a traditional Jewish prayer for the dead, which is a considerable moment following the more than 26,000 deaths in Gaza as a consequence of the war, and the Israeli deaths following the Oct. 7 Hamas attack. The prayers were sung in traditional Arab music style and were led by a collective of mizrahi and sephardic Jews in Brooklyn whose goal is to preserve these aspects of Jewish culture.
The night of the dinner fell on Shabbat Shirah, “the Shabbat of song,” which celebrates the safe passage of the Israelites across the Red Sea and out of Egypt where they were enslaved. Around 10 p.m. a klezmer band set up a tent outside and dozens of attendees came together on the restaurant’s second-floor for a baqashot, a set of songs prayers traditionally recited in the Winter months by Sephardic Jews, whose ancestors were expelled from Spain and fled to regions across North Africa and the Middle East.
While some of those who came to Ayat chose to leave as they were offended by the prayers’ leaders framing of the war in Gaza as a genocide, those who stayed were able to have inspiring and hopeful conversations, easing the ethno-religious tensions that have been rampant in the city.
