[Among the over 200 more usual Danish motorcycle clubs, MuJu & Co], was co-founded in 2019 by Dan Meyrowitsch, a 60-year-old Jewish epidemiologist at the University of Copenhagen, and 44-year-old Muslim and medical doctor Sohail Asghar. The two have been friends for many years and always shared a passion for motorcycles.
“It actually started as a joke,” Meyrowitsch recounts. “I suggested to Sohail … that we should start the world’s first Jewish-Muslim motorcycle club. But he loved the idea right away…
Even growing up in a traditional Jewish family near Copenhagen with experiencing much racism personally, Meyrowitsch always felt an affinity for motorcycles, and a sense of resistance about minority cultural stereotypes. He felt there didn’t need to be distance between Jews and Muslims in Denmark, and that it should be bridged.
Another member, Said Idrissi, 52, a carpenter living most of his life in Denmark, was born in Morocco and raised in a traditional Muslim family in a very tough Copenhagen neighborhood. Immediately on hearing of MuJu & Co, he wanted to join. He’d grown up hearing it said that Jews and Muslims couldn’t get along, and in his neighborhood that you can’t trust Jews. But no one there knew any, and had no idea who they really are. Now, when Idrissi tells them about the club, people show interest, and he makes a point of the positive experience it is.
The club’s weekly tour seasons runs March through October. As a group, they’ve visited and spoken in churches, mosques, synagogues, museums and cemeteries across Denmark, even the annual Jewish culture festival in Copenhagen, fielding all kinds of questions about the club and their aim to promote coexistence, and themselves learning about similarities between their heritages.
On Ramadan, the Jewish members fast lightly in order to experience the observance alongside the friends. On Chanuka, the ancient stories are shared. Idrissi recently attended a bar mitzva for the first time. In May of 2020, Abdul Wahid Pedersen, a leading Danish imam rode his Harley Davidson with the club, with Denmark’s late chief rabbi, the aging Jair Melchior, as his backseat passenger. Together with regular club members, they spoke with audiences about coexistence and greater shared dialogue.
The president of Denmark’s Jewish community called the rabbi’s and imam’s joint bike trip a development both positive and amusing, a good way to open many doors.
Especially with so many forces that club members recognize trying to widen barriers between their cultures. As in much of Europe, the Muslim community of Denmark numbers many times more than its Jewish counterpart, roughly 320,000 to 6,000. Antisemitic and Islamophobic attacks are not common, but they can be very ugly, such as the vandalizing of 84 tombstones in a Jewish cemetery there in 2019 on the same date as Kristallnacht, (November 9-10, 1938 — the Nazi pogrom throughout Germany, Austria and the Sudetenland, to destroy Jewish homes and workplaces, arresting 30,000 Jewish men sent to concentration camps, and a death toll of hundreds of elders, women and children — historically considered the start of the Holocaust) — the club has guarded Copenhagen’s Jewish cemeteries on that date, since.
The members vary somewhat in their political involvements, but reject social media trends capitalizing on divisiveness. They recognize that there are political forces seeking to gain power by playing minorities against one another whenever news reports of international events offer the opportunity. They say that’s exactly a reason Muju & Co matters, to counter that kind of narrative by visibly exemplifying the daily-life reality that Denmark’s Jews and Muslims interact positively, without it being particularly unique — simply their inclusive way of life.
Which is the club’s basis — it’s about a third Muslim and a third Jewish, and their board assesses each applicant individually, regardless of gender or religion, sustaining the commitment to the principle of friendly coexistence.
Shabbat shalom.
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