
Daily Kickoff: Senators in Israel, UAE + The Moses Ben Maimon Synagogue opens
👋 Good Tuesday morning!
In today’s Daily Kickoff, we report from the opening of the Moses Ben Maimon Synagogue in Abu Dhabi and spotlight the possible 2024 GOP presidential hopefuls and other U.S. politicians on the ground in Israel andthe Middle Eastthis week. Also in today’s Daily Kickoff: Sen. Bob Menendez, L.A. Mayor Karen Bass and Natan Levy.
With the House and Senate both in recess, a number of delegations and members are visiting the Middle East this week.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is in the United Arab Emirates today with a Republican Senate delegation after first traveling to Saudi Arabia. The delegation, which includes Sens. Pete Ricketts (R-NE), Thom Tillis (R-NC) Ted Budd (R-NC), Joni Ernst (R-IA), Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) and Katie Britt (R-AL), is meeting with UAE President Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan and other leaders in the UAE. McConnell met on Sunday with Saudi Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), who is leading a delegation in India, will travel to Israel later this week.
Sens. Tom Cotton (R-AR) and Jim Risch (R-ID) are already in Tel Aviv this week for the Tikvah Fund’s Hertog Forum, which kicks off tonight with a conversation between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Walter Russell Mead. (Spotted in the Knesset yesterday: Netanyahu speaking to reporters — and apparently preparing for tonight’s event — with a copy of Mead’s The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People in hand.)
Risch is slated to speak with Mead tomorrow afternoon in a session titled “The Politics of Support for Israel,” which will be followed by a keynote address by former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Cotton, who in addition to Pompeo is said to be considering a 2024 White House bid, will give tomorrow evening’s keynote.
The three-day forum ends on Thursday, with McConnell and former Special Representative for Iran and Venezuela Elliott Abrams speaking during a second session on “The Politics of Support for Israel.” U.S. Ambassador to Israel Tom Nides and his predecessor, former Ambassador David Friedman, will close out the gathering on Thursday evening.
on location
UAE Jewish community opens the Moses Ben Maimon Synagogue

ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates — Standing majestically alongside a mosque and church of equal external dimensions, with common white-stone exteriors and arching architectural styles, yet each with its own unique twist and respective religious symbols, the Moses Ben Maimon Synagogue in UAE capital was officially opened to the local Jewish community on Sunday. On Thursday evening the larger Abrahamic Family House, of which the Moses Ben Maimon Synagogue is a part, was inaugurated. Jewish Insider’s Tamara Zieve was in Abu Dhabi to capture the scene and speak with community members.
Festive affair: The event, attended by approximately 325 guests celebrating the landmark occasion with live music and food, included bringing a Torah scroll into the synagogue for the first time and affixing a mezuzah on a doorpost. Sunday also marked the first prayer service held in the synagogue as the afternoon prayer of Mincha was recited. Children’s activities for younger community members were on offer in the rabbinic residence of Rabbi Ben de Toledo and Rabbanit Yael de Toledo — the young couple who moved to Abu Dhabi from Jerusalem to help lead services at the synagogue. After the main gathering there was also an intimate upsherin — a ritual hair-cutting tradition common in certain Jewish communities — for a local three-year-old boy from Saadiyat Island, marking another first of many celebrations at the site.
Then and now: The words “amazing” and “historic” echoed throughout the synagogue, while longtime members of the UAE’s Jewish community reminisced about how far they had come, one of them telling JI how she used to bring two suitcases in from abroad to host Shabbat in the country. At the front of the synagogue — hailed as the “first purpose-built synagogue” to open its doors in the Gulf in nearly 100 years — the Ten Commandments are written out in clear dark Hebrew letters on the cool stone walls, and two gold menorahs stand on either side of the wooden ark. Layers of geometric criss-cross lines rise up 30 meters to the roof, allowing light to filter in and giving a resemblance of a sukkah and wedding canopy.
First prayers: Rabbi Yehuda Sarna, the chief rabbi of the Moses Ben Maimon Synagogue, opened the event and Cantor Alex Peterfreund led the congregants through a series of verses. Sarna then invited Rabbi Levi Duchman, the first resident rabbi of the United Arab Emirates and head of Chabad in the UAE, to recite a Jewish prayer in Hebrew for the leaders and government of the UAE. The same prayer was also delivered in Arabic by Rabbi Yosef Hamdi, the leader of the small Jewish Yemenite community in Abu Dhabi that was rescued two years ago by the Emirati government. Hamdi’s 13-year-old son later sang a prayer himself, filling the synagogue with soulful Yemeni Arabic vocals. “Today is something special,” Hamdi told JI. “For all the people of Israel.”
All walks of life: The crowd represented a microcosm of the multicultural society of the United Arab Emirates, a country of more than 200 nationalities living in the Gulf nation, according to government statistics. “In one way or another, we are all on some kind of Abrahamic journey,” Sarna, who has been a driving force in the evolution of the Jewish community in the UAE, told the congregation. “We have all responded to some kind of call bringing us here to the UAE. For each of us, our journey may have begun at a different point of origin. Participating in the ceremony today are Jews from Iran, from Yemen, from Europe, from Russia, from Ukraine, the U.K. and both Americas. Some of us have been here for decades and others have just arrived,” he continued.
Read the full dispatch here.
Bonus: In The Wall Street Journal, Walter Russell Mead offers a perspective of the U.S from Dubai and how the UAE is approaching competition with Saudi Arabia. “For now, the U.A.E. is responding to these pressures by focusing on its strengths. One of them is its flexibility. Thanks to more relaxed attitudes among a smaller native population, the Emiratis can take steps Riyadh can scarcely match that signal its openness to foreigners and their investments. As the Saudis dither over their relations with Israel, the Emiratis are opening kosher restaurants and synagogues. In a development even more shocking to conservative Islamic jurists, but much to the joy of the Emirates’ estimated 3.5 million resident workers from India, a Hindu temple opened in October in Dubai.”