In a historic home near Dubai Creek, a small gallery dedicated to the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust sits among exhibits on Islamic civilization, Emirati history and the history of Palestine and the Holy Land.
The display at the privately owned Crossroads of Civilizations Museum is one of the Arab world’s first permanent Holocaust exhibitions. It opened in May 2021, less than a year after the United Arab Emirates established relations with Israel under the Abraham Accords, and has come to represent the country’s effort to encourage religious coexistence.
The gallery documents Nazi persecution. Among its exhibits is a life-size image of the boy in the well-known Warsaw Ghetto photograph, standing with his hands raised. It also recounts the actions of Muslims who helped save Jews, including Egyptian doctor Mohammed Helmy, who sheltered Jewish people in Berlin.
The story of how the exhibition came to be is personal, too. Museum founder Ahmed Obaid Al Mansoori, a former member of the UAE’s Federal National Council, said his interest in historical objects began when he was young and inherited family manuscripts and belongings from his grandparents.
He started collecting in a more organized way in 1989 and opened a private museum in his home in 2006. As the collection grew, Dubai authorities provided a historic building for it. The museum opened to the public in 2014.
The Holocaust gallery came later. Al Mansoori said two experiences led him to create it. One was a visit to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington in the 1990s. He was moved by the idea that the Holocaust was a human tragedy whose lessons mattered to everyone.
The other was a conversation with an American Jewish acquaintance who worried about rising antisemitism in the United States. Al Mansoori said he initially brushed off her concerns. Then, after seeing antisemitic imagery circulate during a period of unrest in the country, he reconsidered. “I realized I was wrong,” he said.
In 2021, he worked with Jewish friends and colleagues to organize a Holocaust remembrance event in Dubai. The effort brought together an international group of Arabs, Jews and Christians to help create the gallery.
What began as a memorial event grew into something more lasting. Al Mansoori said visitors, including people from the UAE and other parts of the region, responded positively when the exhibition opened. There was criticism as well, but he decided it belonged in the museum permanently. “I thought it was very beautiful, very important. And it must stay,” he recalled.
The exhibition officially opened on May 26, 2021, with the Israeli and German ambassadors to the UAE in attendance.
Al Mansoori’s approach also reaches beyond Holocaust history. Elsewhere in the museum, historical maps of Palestine are displayed alongside Jewish manuscripts, photographs and documents that reflect the region’s overlapping pasts. He said he wanted visitors to encounter different historical perspectives in the same space, including Israeli and Palestinian ones.
He also recalled a visit by rabbis in August 2020, when Muslim, Jewish and Christian guests prayed at the museum according to their own traditions.
For Al Mansoori, the aim is not to make religious or political differences disappear. It is to help people live alongside those differences with respect. “It’s how to learn to be comfortable being yourself next to others. And others must be also comfortable to be next to you,” he said.
With war and political tensions continuing to divide the Middle East, he sees the museum as one way to face the region’s difficult history: by making room for visitors to learn about experiences beyond their own.
