The Salaam Shalom Kitchen is a joint Jewish and Muslim community kitchen in Nottingham. They use surplus food from local supermarkets to make free dinners for people in need. The Jewish community and Muslim community wanted to come together to do something good for their city. They say they wanted to be visibly working together to show people of different religion can work together. Volunteer Karen Worth says, "It is a wider held belief that Jews and Muslims don't get on and we wanted to prove that wasn't the case."
Volunteer Serjio Rocha says, "What unites better than food?" and Anne Lawrie says, "You do come together with people you wouldn't normally perhaps come together with... and there's no barriers."
Before the pandemic, the kitchen used to provide about 80 meals a day but now they provide about 160 meals. Local people using the service talk about the kitchen being like a family for them.
You can see a short film about the kitchen in the link above.
What do you see in the picture, what is happening, where do you think they are?
How are the people similar, how are they different?
- What is a community kitchen?
- what is unusual about this community kitchen?
- where do the words Salaam and Shalom come from, why do you think the kitchen uses those words in its name? (Salaam is a common Arabic greeting, Shalom is a common Jewish greeting)
- why do you think their T-shirts say, "More Mitzvahs together"?
- Where do you think the idea that Jewish and Muslim people do not get along comes from?
- why do the two communities talk about their faith? Why didn't they agree to stop mentioning their different faiths while they work together in the kitchen?
- "We wanted to be visibly working together" why is it important to show everyone that some volunteers are Muslim and some are Jewish?
- "You do come together with people you wouldn't normally perhaps come together with" why don't people normally come together?
- "There's no barriers," what does that mean?
- how does food unite people?
- what can we learn from the Salaam Shalom kitchen?
- why is this about No Outsiders?
www.no-outsiders.com
