Chabad House Uses Mosque For Their Minyanim

Sheik Moussa Drammeh with (left to right) Rabbi Meir Kabakow, Shmuel Notik and Wayne Yaakov Baumann

Middle East peace has broken out — in The Bronx.

Jews and Muslims are bosom buddies inside the Islamic Cultural Center of North America — home to both the Al-Iman Mosque and Beis Menachem of Parkchester, Cahbad synagogue.

Right now we are a family. The rabbis are our brothers,” said Sheik Moussa Drammeh, 50, who opened to them the doors of his 25,000-square-foot, two-story center on Westchester Avenue.

Cahbad Rabbi Meir Kabakow, 26, said: “Even though they are Muslims and we are Jews, there is no hate between the two. That’s the way God made things happen — he sent us a place in a mosque.”

The unique arrangement began around 2009, when the synagogue’s organizers couldn’t pay $2,000 a month rent for their White Plains Road storefront and found themselves on the street.

The wandering congregation petitioned community leaders and officials for help, and found it — when a Catholic stepped in.

Everyone has a right to worship somewhere,” said community activist Patricia Tomasulo, who helped broker the deal between the center and the synagogue. “If they have this big building, I figured, ‘Why can’t we share?’ ”

But not everyone thought the arrangement, under which the temple stays rent-free, was kosher.

The Islamic center’s school lost about 20 percent of its students, and dozens of mosque worshippers fled — cutting down the flock by a whopping 90 percent.

Some of the Jews left as well, although the rabbi said Jewish law permits the unusual partnership. “They believe in one God, and we believe in one God,” he said.

Prayer times often occur simultaneously, but the Muslims and Jews use separate entrances to the building. They occasionally kibitz afterward in a vast communal area, Drammeh said.

Because of the objections, the synagogue was moved after a few weeks from a room with a window, where it was viewable from the street, to a more isolated location deeper inside the property.

There’s less drama there,” Drammeh said.

Through it all, the imam has not wavered — and has refused calls to kick out the synagogue congregation.

I would do this if I was the last one in the building,” he said.