Shabbat with Rabbi Marc & Sheikh Ghassan Manasra

Steeped in the traditions of our ancestors with a modern day approach, each Shabbat Service will leave you feeling connected to your community, your faith and yourself. At TAO, we hold people, not prayer books. Our virtual siddur, projected behind the bimah, frees your hands to clap, drum and shake your tambourine. However you connect, we invite you to join us – the singing and dancing shul.  See you there in joy.

Sheikh Ghassan Manasra is the Abrahamic Reunion’s International Director, and has worked in interfaith peacemaking in the Holy Land, and around the world, for more than 38 years. He is a second-generation peacemaker following in the footsteps of his father, the scholar and Sufi Sheikh, Abdelsalam Manasra.

He is an ordained Sheikh in the Qadiri Sufi Order of Peace in the Holy Land, the founder of Anwar-Il-Salaam, the Lights of Peace Center in Nazareth, and was a founder and the Director of the Islamic Cultural Center in Nazareth.

Ghassan’s peacemaking efforts have included reconciliation between individuals, communities, groups, and nations, working both in the grassroots with the people, and in the highest levels of discourse.

Ghassan is an expert and lectures in Islam, Islamic history, Sufism, and contemporary Muslim issues in the Middle East, Europe, and the USA. He is married to the daughter of the late Sheikh Baghdadi, renowned Muslim leader, and Holy Land facilitator in interfaith dialogue projects, Sheikha Laila Manasra.

Ghassan has received multiple awards and accolades for his peacemaking, including the 2014 “Outstanding Leader in Interreligious Dialogue Award” from the Dialogue Institute at Temple University.

Ghassan is able to build bridges and re-connect peoples because he feels himself to be part of every people, and family with every human being. He looks forward to the time when all human beings will share in this feeling and live in peace together, one with the other, sharing in the beauty of the diversity of this world.