Loading ...Fort Wayne, Indiana celebrates Arab culture and heritage with New Festival
Celebrating and sharing your culture and heritage.
That’s the vision of many Fort Wayne cultural festivals — Germanfest, Greek Festival, Latina Festival and now the new Arab Fest, which takes place Saturday and Sunday at Headwaters Park West.
“We are really catering to family here,” said Sam Jarjour, an Arab Fest committee member and the chairman of the board of the locally based Indiana Center for Middle East Peace.
Arab Fest, which runs 6-10:30 p.m. Saturday and noon-6 p.m. Sunday, will feature Arab food, art, music and dance. Fun activities include camel rides, face painting and playing in an inflatable castle. Visitors also can see henna art, which involves painting intricate designs on the backs of people’s hands, and a demonstration of Arabic lettering.
Admission is free. There will be a charge for food, and camel rides are $5 per person. Arab Fest won’t serve any alcoholic beverages.
The fesitval’s goal is to encourage local people of Arab descent to embrace their heritage and to educate other Fort Wayne residents about the local Arab-American community, Jarjour said.
The idea of holding an Arab festival grew out of discussions by board members of the Indiana Center for Middle East Peace about ways to let the community know about the local Arab community and its positive impact here, Jarjour said.
People from Arab countries began settling in Fort Wayne in the late 1800s, he said. Indiana Tech recruited students actively in the 1950s in the Middle East, which brought his father to Fort Wayne, Jarjour said. More recent additions to the local Arab community have been current students and refugees escaping danger or problems in their homelands.
The early immigrants mainly observed the Christian faith, but people arriving more recently largely have been Muslim, he said. The Fort Wayne Arab community now numbers about 1,000 people.
Arab community members founded the local Maloley grocery stores, Azar’s restaurants and other businesses, and they also have made many other contributions to the community, Jarjour said.
Source: www.news-sentinel.com