(JTA) An imam from the Swedish city of Malmo for the first time confirmed his attendance at the city’s Kristallnacht Holocaust commemoration event.
The planned attendance Saturday night of Salahuddin Barakat, founder of Malmo’s Academy of Islam, at Malmo’s synagogue is an important milestone in interfaith work designed to curb anti-Semitism in the city, according to the local rabbi, Moshe David HaCohen.
Last year, HaCohen and Barakat, who is Sunni, attended a Kristallnacht event in the nearby city of Lund. But this year, the 81st anniversary of the series of pogroms that erupted in Germany and Austria in 1938 and marked the first [use] of wide-scale violence by the Nazis against Jews, will be the first Muslim-Jewish commemoration in Malmo itself.
