veiled4allah: Jewish couple celebrates wedding anniversary at Muslim school

Here's a heartwarming story with a local twist. The Seattle Times has the whole.

Sixty-two years ago, Alice Siegal wore a powder-blue wool suit, a pillbox hat and a veil and married her sweetheart, Arthur, in the gymnasium of the Seattle Talmud Torah, a Jewish day school in the Central District. Tomorrow, she and her husband will celebrate their anniversary in the same brick-faced building. It looks pretty much the same, except for one thing: An Arabic verse from the Quran now hangs over the Star of David near the front door.

The building now houses the Islamic School of Seattle, which doesn't bother the Siegals one bit. In fact, they're thrilled.

"I'm just really very touched," said Alice Siegal, who is 80. "I think anything we can do to get to know each other better is wonderful."

In May, Arthur Siegal, who is 85, organized a volunteer group from the couple's synagogue to do a mitzvah, or a good deed, at the school. The school needed to refill its playground, and Siegal offered a crew from Temple De Hirsch Sinai to distribute 100 yards of wood chips.

While he was there, he casually mentioned to a school director that he was married in the building.

"We just got all excited about it," said Ann El-Moslimany, another director at the school. So the school invited the Siegals for an anniversary celebration with cake and refreshments.

"Muslims and Jews have always gotten along until recently with the state of Israel," El-Moslimany said. "But as far as the religion and what we believe in, we're both people of faith, and we both believe in one God. ... I think it's great they're coming."

The Jewish school was built in 1935, but the building became a welfare office and had other purposes after a number of Jewish families moved away. The Islamic School bought the building in 1981.

El-Moslimany said that the Star of David is still on the wall, and that she has thought of moving the school's wooden logo, which says, "O Lord, increase my knowledge," so that the star is visible.

"We think of the Jews as our cousins in faith," she said, adding that she belongs to Children of Abraham, an interfaith group of Muslims, Jews and Christians. "Certainly we're all children of the same God."

Alice Siegal grew up in Seattle in an Orthodox family, which considered Islam "another religion in an exotic land" if it considered Islam at all, she said. Arthur grew up in a small town in New Mexico, where he was one of a handful of Jews among Catholics. It wasn't until the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that their interest in Islam grew, and they began volunteering as guardians at the Islamic School to ward off anti-Muslim attacks.

They've since attended interfaith forums and a fund-raiser for earthquake victims in Iran.

"We all live in one world. There's no reason why we can't get to know each other better and live in peace," Alice said.

The Central District in Seattle is one of the more ethnically diverse over its history, having been home to Asian Americans, Jews, and African-Americans, among others. Currently, the neighborhood where the Islamic School is located is predominately African-American.