Jews and Muslims look for common ground

In a swanky conference room of a downtown Boston law firm, Benjamin Debush recalled how he was spit on, imprisoned and forced to flee his native Libya because he was Jew.

Jamal Ait Hammou said he was taunted for being a Berber and beaten after standing up to a radical Islamic group in his native Morocco.

They shared their stories as part of a new program co-sponsored by the American Jewish Committee Boston and the American Islamic Congress, a non-religious, civil rights organization founded by Muslim Americans after Sept.11.

“The Witnesses Initiative: Stories of Repression and Redemption” brings together Middle Eastern Jews, Muslims and Christians who experienced human rights violations, discrimination and violence in their native countries.

“There are people like this from all over the Middle East, including many Sephardic Jews, but their stories are not widely known,” said Rob Leikind, director of AJC Boston.

By sharing their experiences, Jews and Muslims can focus on the values they share rather than the politics that may divide them, Leikind said.

“We are putting the question of human rights front and center because it is of vital importance to all the people in the Middle East,” he said.

The two organizations have been working on this series since long before the revolutions and uprisings in the Middle East, according to Leikind.

The theme of the March 28 event – the second in the series – was “Facing Death.” Both men told stories of growing up as minorities in the Middle East and how it could have cost them their lives.

Debush, now of Stoughton, grew up in the insular Jewish community of Benghazi.

“We weren’t even second-class citizens, we were third-class citizens,” Debush, 64, recalled. “We couldn’t vote, we didn’t have Libyan nationality, they didn’t give us passports, we couldn’t work in the government. … We would get beat up in the street, we would get spit on in the street.”

Between 1949 and 1952, more than 90 percent of Libyan Jews immigrated to Israel, according to the Institute of Global Jewish Affairs.

But Debush’s father — a successful importer of goods and food from overseas – decided the family would stay put.

Then, with the 1967 Six-Day War, every Jew in Benghazi was rounded up and taken to a military camp outside the city.

They were given a choice: Leave the country with one suitcase and whatever money they had left, or stay and watch their homes and businesses burn to the ground. Only one person chose to stay, Debush remembered.

On the way out of Benghazi, Debush saw flames engulfing a section of the Jewish quarter.

Later, he would hear of an entire Jewish family murdered in a field.

As the plane was taking off – bound for a refugee camp in Italy – Debush remembers feeling only one emotion.

“Relief,” he said. “It was all done. And I haven’t seen Libya since.”

Hammou’s story was a bit different.

He said he grew up in a Berber village in a family that was Muslim, but not observant.

While discrimination against Berbers, an indigenous ethnic group of North Africa, was not as systemic as it was against Jews, Hammou said he still felt like an outcast.

“My teachers would make fun of me because of my accent,” Hammou, 38, remembered. “People look down at you; they use derogatory words. People think you’re nothing.”

But it wasn’t his ethnicity that almost got him killed.

One day at university, Hammou said a large fight broke out between radical Islamists and other student groups. On his way to the library, Hammou was cornered by four Islamists.

They asked what he knew about the other groups. When he said he didn’t know anything, the men started beating him, one threatening to break his leg.

“One guy had a big knife and he put it to my throat and said ‘talk or that’s it, it’s going to end,’” Hammou said.

Eventually, they let him go.

“From that day, I decided this is not the right way to treat people, and I will stand against [radicals] anytime, anywhere I go,” Hammou said.

Hammou now lives in Milton and, like Debush, is an American citizen.

This kind of story-telling represents a new strategy in fostering Jewish, Muslim relations, said Nasser Weddady, the national director for civil rights outreach at the AIC.

“It’s a show rather than tell approach,” Weddady said. “There is a notion that everyone is doing dialogue just for the sake of dialoguing, and that is a recipe for failure. We are showing our commitment for shared values.”

Those values include human rights; religious, political and ethnic tolerance; and equality under the law, Weddady said.

“It doesn’t matter if you’re Jewish, Muslim, Christian or Baha’i, at the end of the day, these are G-dgiven rights,” he said.

The series could be a first step in building a broader discussion about the Middle East and perhaps even the Israeli-Palestinian situation, Leikind said.

“But right now, we are just focusing on the stories,” he said.

The next event is scheduled for May.

For more infor mation, visit www.ajcboston.org