On September 29, 2025, following the international conference “Jews and the Persianate World: Politics, Culture, and Historical Ties”, the Afghan Institute for Strategic Studies (AISS), in collaboration with Georgetown University’s Center for Jewish Civilization, and supported by the Muslim American Leadership Alliance (MALA) and the American Sephardi Federation (ASF), hosted Rumi Night in Washington: Celebrating Our Shared Humanity at the Museum of the Bible. The evening gathered scholars, artists, and spiritual figures from different faiths to mark the convergence of memory and art, intellect and devotion. It was not a formal closing of the day’s academic discussions, but rather their emotional continuation-a return to the essence of culture, where prayer, poetry, and song meet beyond politics and geography.

In his welcoming remarks, AISS Director-General Dr. Davood Moradian described the evening as a gathering of three civilizational virtues: forgiveness, perseverance, and love. He called forgiveness the essence of Christianity, embodied in the figure of Christ; perseverance, the core of Jewish endurance through centuries of exile; and love, the defining spirit of Persian civilization.

Dr. Moradian spoke without ornament, yet the substance of his reflection was deeply moral. He noted that none of these virtues hold meaning when confined to one’s own kind. Forgiveness, he said, must extend to the enemy, not only the friend. Perseverance, to be genuine, must also recognize the suffering of others. And love, the Persian inheritance, must remain unconditional, or it ceases to be love at all.

The night’s first conversation brought together author Sara Y. Aharon and filmmaker Dr. Sahraa Karimi for a discussion of Aharon’s book From Kabul to Queens: The Jews of Afghanistan and Their Move to the United States. Aharon spoke about her motivation to recover a history that had nearly vanished-one not found in libraries, but in family memories, oral traditions, and the fading recollections of an older generation. The discussion coincided with the launch of the Persian translation of the book, published by the Afghan Institute for Strategic Studies (AISS).

She recounted her grandparents’ life in Herat, her father’s early years in Kabul, and the loss of an entire cultural world when Afghan Jews emigrated to Israel and the United States. Her book, she explained, is both a historical study and an act of remembrance-an effort to reassemble fragments of belonging.

Aharon spoke of Jewish coexistence with Muslims in Afghanistan, noting that, while inequality existed, relations were largely functional and often affectionate. She cited examples of shared languages, customs, and trade. Her use of Afghan folktales within a historical narrative, she explained, was deliberate: stories, more than data, preserve the emotional truth of a people.

Following the literary segment, Reuben Shimonov, a Bukharian Jewish artist and educator from Uzbekistan, took the stage to present his work at the intersection of Hebrew, Arabic, and Persian calligraphy. Through his slides, he reconstructed a visual language of coexistence. Each artwork merged sacred scripts without hierarchy-letters from different faiths flowing into one another like rivers meeting at a delta. Shimonov described his calligraphy as an embodiment of both personal and historical hybridity. His ancestors had lived in Central Asia for centuries, interacting daily with Islamic art, Persian poetry, and Jewish liturgy. For him, the artistic act was not aesthetic alone-it was a recovery of historical truth. “Our ancestors,” he said, “did not live in sealed traditions. They breathed in shared air-language, art, melody, and architecture.”

He showed photographs of Bukhara’s mosques and synagogues, pointing out how Jewish houses of worship had borrowed the geometric and floral motifs of Islamic design. He also displayed his calligraphic works inscribed with phrases like Gam zeh ya’avor “This too shall pass” written in Hebrew, and In ham migzarad in Persian. One of his final pieces read Shalom - Salam under a shared dome, symbolizing the unity of sacred tongues. Shimonov concluded by dedicating his presentation to “the women of Afghanistan and their struggle for equality,” linking his art of language to their struggle for voice. His presentation was quiet but piercing-a visual theology of coexistence, rendered through the ink of memory.

Hershel Hepler, Associate Curator of Hebrew Manuscripts at the Museum of the Bible, delivered an absorbing lecture on the discovery and preservation of the Afghan Liturgical Choir-a Hebrew manuscript dating to the eighth century. Hepler’s tone was scholarly yet deeply human, for his story was not merely about a book, but about the Afghan villagers who had protected it. He traced the manuscript’s origins to a cave near Bamiyan, the same valley where the great Buddhas once stood before their destruction. Inside that cave, alongside remnants of Buddhist and Islamic texts, a bundle of parchment had survived more than a millennium. Written in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Judeo-Persian, the codex contained prayers, psalms, and poems-proof that Afghanistan had once been home to a vibrant Jewish spiritual tradition.

Hepler explained that the manuscript’s structure-a single choir of fifteen sheets-revealed its antiquity, older than any other known Hebrew codex. It was, he said, the oldest complete Hebrew book ever found. Yet what made its story remarkable was not its age but its journey: how it was preserved by a Hazara man during the civil war, how it passed through local hands, and how Afghan officials later supported its international preservation rather than claiming ownership. “This act,” Hepler said, “was not political but moral. Afghanistan chose dignity over possession.” He called it one of the rare examples of a human-rights approach to cultural heritage-prioritizing access for a displaced community over the prestige of national ownership. He ended by recalling the moment when Jack Abraham, an Afghan-born Jew, read aloud from the manuscript without any glass barrier between him and the text. “Thirteen centuries after it was written,” Hepler said, “its voice returned to the living. That is not archaeology. That is restoration of soul.”

The evening reached its moral and emotional height with an address by Pastor Dr. Mark Burns, a Christian leader known for his global interfaith outreach. Burns began by recalling his encounters with religious leaders across continents: “I have prayed with Jews in Ukraine, shared bread with Muslims in Eswatini, and stood with Hindu gurus in India.” Through these experiences, he said, one truth had become clear-human beings share more than they divide. He rejected what he called “the destructive lie that Islam is inherently violent,” condemning the use of religion as an instrument of fear. “Muslims are not the enemy,” he declared. “No faith is immune from corruption, but faith itself is not the problem-fear is.” He recounted how Christianity, too, had been distorted by power, used to justify slavery and violence, and warned against letting holy words become tools of domination.

Burns’s message was not political, though he spoke as a Republican pastor and former spiritual adviser to President Donald Trump. It was moral. “We cannot bomb our way to peace,” he said. “Every strike that misses its target plants a new seed of hatred.” His critique was both theological and humanistic: that power without empathy desecrates all faiths. He drew the audience’s attention to Gaza and Ukraine, speaking of civilians dying under bombardment. Quoting Martin Luther King Jr., he reminded the audience that history judges not by “the cries of our enemies but by the silence of our friends.” His voice, alternately rising and breaking, turned the hall into a listening chamber. “We may not agree on everything,” he said, “but we can agree that bombs will never bring peace.” He ended by calling for “a global fellowship of conscience,” where Jews, Christians, and Muslims defend each other’s right to worship without fear. His last words, echoing Dr. King, were both prayer and challenge: “Free at last, free at last-thank God Almighty, we are free at last.

The night closed with a performance by the Yuval Ensemble, Sufi songs by Khwaja Ehrari and Samaa Dance by Elhma Delaveri, whose music fused Persian mysticism with Jewish liturgical chant. Their melodies-layered with traditional instruments and Hebrew-Persian verses-carried the room into a contemplative silence.