Simon Wiesenthal Center uses Web site to inform Muslims about Judaism

A Web site, launched by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, will inform Muslims about Judaism through a forum that allows visitors to post live questions in Arabic, Farsi, Urdu, Bahasa and English.

Photo: Simon Wiesenthal Center uses Web site to inform Muslims about Judaism

The Web site, www.AskMusa.org, which means Ask Moses in Arabic, also will offer essays about Judaism by Jewish scholars and authors.

The concept for the Web site was developed by Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Los Angeles-based organization that focuses on Holocaust remembrance and human rights.

The center said Cooper came up with the idea after meetings with imams and other Muslims in Egypt, Sudan, Jordan, Indonesia and India showed him that many Muslims - even highly educated ones - knew very little about the most basic tenets of Judaism.

"In an environment where the current perception of Jews is largely shaped by the most extreme elements," Cooper said in a statement Monday, "we have to reach out so that the truth about Jews and Judaism is readily available to Arab and Muslim societies."

The Wiesenthal Center said in a release that the Web site was "a new front in the digital era in the fight to combat anti-Semitism and erase the myths about Judaism and the Holocaust currently being propagated on the Internet by Muslim extremists and anti-Semitic regimes."