
Daily Kickoff: Interview with Sir David Adjaye + Hebrew U’s new course on the UAE
👋 Good Wednesday morning!
In today’s Daily Kickoff, we interview Sir David Adjaye, the award-winning architect of the Abrahamic Family House in Abu Dhabi, which includes the Moises Ben Maimon Synagogue. We also talked to senators on Capitol Hill yesterday about the recent China-brokered agreement between Saudi Arabia and Iran. Others in today’s Daily Kickoff: Chanan Weissman, Jacob Steinmetz and Amelia Dimoldenberg.
The Maimonides Fund is opening an in-house institute to turn ideas generated by its quarterly Sapir Journal into viable plans of action, tapping Chanan Weissman, the former two-time White House liaison to the American Jewish community, as its director, the organization plans to announce today.
According to Maimonides Fund President Mark Charendoff, the impetus for the SAPIR Institute was feedback from readers of the journal, who wanted to see programs and initiatives inspired by the articles. “We found that every time we put an issue out, people contacted us and said, ‘In this article you raise really good questions, so who’s doing something about this?’ And our response was, ‘We’re a journal, we’re not doing something about this, we just put the idea out there,’” Charendoff told Judah Gross of JI’s sister publication eJewishPhilanthropy on Tuesday. “After a year, we thought maybe there is a vacuum in the market.”
The new institute is scheduled to launch on April 1. For now, Weissman will be the sole member of the team, though it will likely expand with time. Weissman, who is coming to Maimonides Fund from the State Department, served two stints as the White House liaison to the American Jewish community, first in the final year of the Obama administration and then in the first year of the Biden administration.
Though Weissman will be the only employee of Sapir Institute for the time being, he will not be alone in this work. The plan is for Weissman to identify the topics for the institute to develop and then invite representatives from other organizations, stakeholders and thinkers to discuss the topic and come up with an actionable plan.
“Chanan is the conductor, and we’ll put together an accomplished symphony,” Charendoff told eJP. “Chanan has already got a range of meetings set up with key individuals so that he can learn what people’s priorities are and what the best ways are to have these discussions.”
Read more here and sign up for eJewishPhilanthropy’s Your Daily Phil newsletter here.
abrahamic architecture
Interview with Sir David Adjaye, the architect of Abu Dhabi’s Abrahamic Family House

Sitting quietly with his young son lying on his lap on one of the back rows of the oak wood benches in the Moses Ben Maimon Synagogue in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, Sir David Adjaye appeared keen to blend in with the crowd. As bright midday sunlight filtered into the sanctuary on a recent Sunday in February, the architect of the Abrahamic Family House was soaking in the moment among the approximately 325 guests gathered to mark the opening of the synagogue. Jewish Insider’s Tamara Zieve sat down with Adjaye that day to meet the individual responsible for the design of the first-of-its-kind complex.
Among the crowd: “Hello, rabbi! I’ve been caught,” the award-winning Ghanaian-British architect laughed good-humoredly moments later, greeting Rabbi Yehuda Sarna, chief rabbi of the synagogue, as Sarna passed him. As JI began the interview with Adjaye, several admirers of his work quickly caught wind of who he was and began eagerly questioning him about the inspiration for the three iconic houses of worship he designed — a mosque, church and synagogue that stand side by side in a monumental interfaith complex on Saadiyat Island, Abu Dhabi’s cultural hub.
Equal but different: “The deep history of all the religions,” Adjaye said, was the inspiration for the synagogue, named after the 12th-century rabbinic philosopher Maimonides, the His Holiness Francis Church, named after St. Francis of Assisi, and the Imam Al-Tayeb Mosque, named for the grand imam of the Al-Azhar Mosque in Cairo. “The concept is three temples, 30-by-30-by 30 [meters] — three. Three pylons. So if you notice each room, each volume from the exterior to the exterior and the height are all equal,” Adjaye, 56, told JI. “So they’re three equal forms. But in each — three different atmospheres.”
Sukkah style: Adjaye’s inspiration for the synagogue, which is oriented towards Jerusalem, was the Jewish holiday of Sukkot. The criss-cross beams that rise up to the roof, allowing light to filter in through the gaps, represent palm leaves or plants covering the sukkah, and allow congregants to look “up to the heavens,” Adjaye said. Adjaye, whose works include the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., and the National Cathedral of Ghana, had initially wanted to make the roof open, but noted that this wasn’t possible for technical reasons. A bronze mesh tent — symbolizing the original tabernacle, known to have included a bronze laver — cascades from a skylight in the ceiling, which allows in midday sun and creates the effect of dappled light, a theme that carries through the three houses of worship.
Location, location, location: The architect, who hails from Ghana’s capital city of Accra, spent a lot of time in the UAE while working on the buildings. “I think that what Abu Dhabi is doing by opening up is very powerful,” he remarked. Adjaye describes as “critical statements” the Document on Human Fraternity for World Peace and Living Together, signed by Pope Francis and Sheikh Ahmed Al-Tayeb, grand imam of Al-Azhar Mosque on Feb. 4, 2019. “And to do it here, I think, on this continent was so symbolic and so powerful. And I hope that it has a ripple effect in the world,” he added.
‘Magical moment’: Sitting inside the Moses Ben Maimon Synagogue on its first day of prayer was a meaningful moment for Adjaye. “It’s just such a magical moment to see it full of people,” he said. “I always love the moment when something we’ve been working on, something that’s been in the head, is suddenly taken over by people,” the architect continued. “And they know how to use it because of the rituals and the patterns of what these things mean. So it’s beautiful. It’s always humbling.”