Student organization joins religious faiths for dinner
Rosh Hashana and Eid ul-Fitr are only a day apart on the calendar this year, and the Turkish Student Association’s Annual Friendship Dinner plans to unite their two religious groups, Jews and Muslims, in the Goldstein Auditorium at 6:30 p.m.
The Jewish New Year will be wrapping up just as the end of the holy Islamic fasting month commences, as both Muslims and Jews celebrate their different holidays together.
The dinner is aimed at bringing these two faiths, along with many others, closer together in both dialogue and unity.
Held during Ramadan, the dinner breaks the daily fast where Muslims who practice this tradition do not eat or drink from dawn until sunset to focus on prayer, sacrifice and humility for a month.
Dinner invitations were sent to various religious organizations on the SU campus, as well as churches in the Syracuse area, said Gokhan Aydin, vice president of the Turkish Student Association.
‘We would like to see how people are willing to get together in spite of their differences and try to find some common grounds,’ Aydin said.
The campus and community response has been positive. This year, 200 guests are expected to attend, the maximum occupancy for Goldstein Auditorium. For more than five years, the annual dinner took place at smaller hotel venues in Syracuse.
‘This time it is going to be a little bigger,’ Aydin said. ‘In previous ones, we just focused on SU, but this time we are extending invites to people outside of SU.’
Guests will include city officers, FBI representatives, government representatives, the Salvation Army, international community members and local businessmen. Students and faculty from SU, Onondaga Community College, the State University of New York College of Environmental Studies and Forestry and SUNY Oswego were also invited.
Thomas Wolfe, SU’s dean of student affairs, and Kelly Sprinkle, the dean of Hendricks Chapel, will give speeches on their experiences in Turkey from the Hendricks Chapel interfaith travel study trip last spring.
‘We want people to hear directly from people who have been to Turkey,’ Aydin said. ‘We are trying to heal the information gap – the misunderstanding and misperception of Turkey in the U.S. and the U.S. in Turkey.’
The program will also include keynote speaker Ali Yurtsever, a research scholar at Georgetown University, an Adhan (a call to prayer), a movie on Turkish cultural history and traditional Turkish baklava dessert.
‘In Turkey, there are a lot of different cultures and faiths living together: Catholic, Jews and Muslims,’ Aydin said. ‘They have been living together for more than a thousand years.’
The Turkish Student Association’s mission is to educate citizens of Turkey and the United States about each other in an effort to promote global peace.
‘Our main goal is to bring people together from different backgrounds to experience unity and diversity by building bridges between cultures and faith,’ Aydin said.
Although the dinner is not open to the public, it is important for students to know that there are events like this on campus, Aydin said.
‘We are trying to hold it next year too and make more events like this – not this just a once a year thing – and make it a natural process.’
