A group from the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, visiting Saudi Arabia on a good will mission, cut short its trip and is returning to the US after a Jewish member of the delegation was told to remove his head covering before entering a historic site, the Guardian reports.
Upon approaching Diriyah, a world heritage site outside Riyadh to which two members of the delegation had been invited to visit by the government, the commission’s chair, Orthodox Jewish Rabbi Abraham Cooper, was asked to remove his kippah and to keep it off “while at the site and any time he was to be in public, even though the Saudi ministry of foreign affairs had approved the site visit.”
The Commission is a Congressionally-chartered organization designed to help promote religious tolerance and serve in an advisory function to Congress. Ever the diplomat, Rabbi Cooper noted Saudi Arabia was making progress toward its announced goal of having a more open society by 2030. “However,” he noted, “especially in a time of raging antisemitism, being asked to remove my kippah made it impossible for us from USCIRF to continue our visit.”