Overdue celebration
Milwaukee-area Muslims celebrate Eid al-Fitr with a joyful outdoor festival during stressful times.
Bounce houses, cotton candy and upbeat music. h That’s how children in the Milwaukee-area Muslim community Thursday afternoon celebrated Eid al-Fitr, the holiday marking the end of the holy month of Ramadan. h Families of all backgrounds bustled around the sprawling festival set up outside the Islamic Society of Milwaukee’s community center on West Layton Avenue, reconnecting with friends and enjoying the warm weather. h “It’s perfect,” Nisreen Fayaleh of Milwaukee said as she chatted with her friend, Nabila Badad of Franklin, and watched their children play.
The festivities come after a second year that Ramadan, the month of prayer and fasting, had to be downsized due to the pandemic. Fayaleh and Badad said they didn’t host big gatherings to break their fast as usual and only saw extended family once in a while.
The festival — hosted by the Milwaukee Muslim Women’s Coalition — was especially welcome because the coronavirus limited celebrations to a drivethru event last year.
“I’m ecstatic to see the kids out and so happy, especially after two Ramadans that actually have been very difficult,” said Janan Najeeb, founder and president of the coalition.
“It feels like things are getting back to normal,” she said.
Alongside the food trucks and fair rides were a small team of college students who were encouraging attendees to get the COVID-19 vaccine at Hayat Pharmacy next door. The women’s coalition hired multilingual students for the summer to educate the community about vaccination.
Rawan Hamadeh of Brookfield, who just finished her freshman year at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, was at the festival surveying people about their vaccination status.
“There are a lot of rumors being spread about the vaccine and how safe it is,” Hamadeh said. “Our goal is, if they aren’t vaccinated and they don’t want to be vaccinated, to try to educate them and inform them that there is nothing in the vaccine that can harm you.”
And for families with Palestinian heritage, the festival was a bit of a break from the stress of following the escalating violence between Israel and Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, Najeeb said.
“There’s a lot of traumatic experiences that are happening, watching children get killed by Israel by bombs, watching entire buildings of civilians going down, and this is devastating the children, especially if they have family members there,” she said. “It’s oftentimes too much for them to bear.”
For the sizable Palestinian community in Milwaukee, the airstrikes are “foremost on our minds,” Najeeb said.
On Thursday hostilities there intensified. The Palestinian militant group Hamas sent a heavy barrage of rockets deep into Israel as Israel pounded Gaza with more airstrikes and shells and called up 9,000 more reservists who could be used to stage a ground invasion.
Gaza’s Health Ministry said the death toll has climbed to 103 Palestinians, including 27 children and 11 women, with 530 people wounded. Islamic Jihad confirmed the deaths of seven militants, while Hamas has acknowledged 13 of its militants killed, including a senior commander. Israel says the number of militants dead is much higher.
Seven people have been killed in Israel. Among them were a soldier killed by an anti-tank missile and a 6-year-old child hit in a rocket attack.
But in celebration of Eid, tens of thousands of Palestinian worshipers gathered at the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, the site of recent violent clashes with Israeli police.
Ream Bahhur of Franklin attended school in Jerusalem and said it has been hard to see the violence in the areas where she grew up, and where friends and family still reside. But she was heartened to see news of the Eid prayers at Al-Aqsa after the clashes.
“It’s really nice that we had a bright day after something so horrid,” Bahhur said.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.