Three Great Religions Making Local History : Jewish, Christian, Islamic Leaders Unite Behind ‘Symbols of Faith’ Exhibition

The 40 or so objects going on display tonight at the Wilshire Boulevard Temple, their beauty and value notwithstanding, will probably never make art history, either as single objects or as an exhibition. But “Symbols of Faith--Peoples of the Book” is making local history, nevertheless.

Jointly sponsored by the temple, the Islamic Center of Southern California and the Archdiocese of Los Angeles’ Commission on Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs, the exhibit will bring the people of the book--that is, the people of the three great religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam--together at a time when they have been characterized more by their political and social divisions than by their common heritage.

The exhibition, built around a Smithsonian traveling exhibit, has been enhanced with local treasures. Its organizers believe it is the first time locally that such a public event has been jointly sponsored by the three religions.

All three religions have their origins among Semitic peoples in the Middle East--an area that today has become a battleground for many of the descendants of those same peoples. The violence of the battle is not confined to that area, however, and the tensions have reached around the world, touching Americans, affecting life in the United States.

In the unlikely event that the significance of a show celebrating the common heritage of the three groups at such a time would be lost on anyone, the point will be brought home in the opening ceremony, which is being dedicated to the memory of Leon Klinghoffer and Alex Odeh.

(Klinghoffer, an American Jew, and Odeh, a naturalized American Catholic born in Palestine, were both killed last year in incidents commonly assumed to relate directly to the tensions--Klinghoffer by the hijackers of the Achille Lauro in the Mediterranean, Odeh when a bomb exploded at the Santa Ana office of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee that he headed.)

The exhibit is “something very special to us,” Rabbi Harvey Fields of Wilshire Boulevard Temple said recently at his office. “It’s really a community celebration at obviously a rather critical moment. . . . We wanted to provide a symbol--a coalition of decency and creativity where we demonstrate on the American scene that Jews, Christians and Muslims could work together. It’s very important not to let the extremists catch the day and control what ultimately are the matters that make the agenda.”

The exhibit, open to the public through Feb. 23, was organized locally by Fields, Msgr. Royale Vadakin of the Catholic archdiocese and Dr. Maher Hathout and Dr. Omar Alfi of the Islamic center. Hathout, who completed a seven-year term as chairman of the Islamic Center in January, now oversees the center’s interreligious activities, among other responsibilities. Vadakin chairs the archdiocesan ecumenical and interreligious affairs commission. Fields, Hathout and Vadakin had known each other from their work on the Interreligious Council of Southern California and had met for private discussions any number of times.

Fields learned about the exhibit, at that point a collection of photographs and quotations arranged on panels, that the Smithsonian Institute’s Traveling Exhibition Service was making available and proposed the joint sponsorship to his two colleagues on the council.

“With the wave of violence that we saw, we felt an intense need for sanity and human decency,” Hathout, a physician, said at his office in Pasadena recently of their desire to do something positive.

Vadakin, speaking at St. Vibiana’s Cathedral, agreed: “I think we were looking for something (to do together),” he said of their receptivity. “Sometimes art, beauty, culture can allow communities to do things together. In areas as deep and complex as interreligious dealings, you have to be able to come at issues from a number of directions. It’s hard to approach head on,” adding that it was necessary to accept the limitations of their efforts. “Somewhere one of us is killing someone else, and we can’t solve that.”

Symbols of Faith

Originally the exhibit had been organized by the Islam Centennial Fourteen Committee in conjunction with the National Geographic Society and shown in Washington in 1982. It concentrated on three symbols of faith, the menorah (the Jewish candlabrum), the icon (Christian religious pictures) and the prayer rug (a transportable carpet used by Muslims to face Mecca during the prescribed prayers five times daily.)

It was decided in Los Angeles to expand the exhibit beyond those three items with objects from local houses of worship and private homes, always emphasizing the common heritage, Fields said.

The common heritage: All three religions originated in the Middle East among Semitic peoples who traditionally regard Abraham as their ancestor. They worship one God and revere scriptures that they believe contain his direct, authoritative revelations to humankind. They believe history has a divine purpose and that good will triumphs over evil.

Historically, and materially, that common heritage has led to some common symbols--lamps, light and flame, the tree of life, the star, birds, flowers and vines, the crown, the hand, the Ten Commandments, the city of Jerusalem. The symbols appear again and again on ritual and decorative art objects in the three religions.

Three Holy Books

At the temple, in addition to menorahs, icons and prayer rugs, sanctuary lamps from all three religions will be displayed as well as a mitre, or crown, from St. Anne’s Melkite Church in North Hollywood, antique silk liturgical cloths embroidered with some of the common symbols, decorated prayer books. And scriptures--a display case housing the three holy books, a modern handwritten scroll of the Torah, an 18th-Century Latin Vulgate edition of the Bible, and an 18th-Century handwritten Koran from Cairo.

The latter comes from the home of Hathout and, he said, has been passed down through generations in his wife’s family. “I had to convince my wife of the nobility of the cause,” he said of this first time it has been put on display. “Every time I hold it, I feel that I am hugging the generations.”

The exhibit was important to the Islamic Center, he said, as an expression of the peaceful nature of the religion, and of the place of local Muslims in American society:

“What we are trying to say is that we are American citizens trying to co-exist with people with whom we may disagree in matters of faith, dogma, politics. We share with them a valuable common ground of morality, belief in God and in the necessity of having a better society in America.”

The dedication to Klinghoffer and Odeh will be done simply. The opening will not be a time of speechmaking, and that is deliberate, Fields said. They would rather celebrate--with the exhibit, with music and poetry of Middle Eastern origin from the three faiths, with refreshments, so that all can walk away “with our feelings uplifted and enriched. . . .”

“It’s a religious statement about what we should be, what we ought to be upholding in a world that terrorizes us into a fearful corner.”