As tensions test interfaith ties, Omaha’s experiment with three-faith campus marks 20 years

(RNS) — A festival this weekend on a 38-acre property in Omaha, Nebraska, will celebrate 20 years of an initiative that has led to the first campus in the United States where a synagogue, mosque and church share the same grounds.

The Sunday (Aug. 30) celebration of the Tri-Faith Initiative will offer kosher hot dogs, halal burgers, and custom-made ice cream, reflecting the staying power of a unique arrangement between three houses of worship and an interfaith center despite geopolitical tensions.

The initiative was created in the wake of 9/11, when members of a synagogue stood guard outside a local mosque to protect their Muslim neighbors amid a massive wave of Islamophobic attacks. In the aftermath, discussions about a far deeper partnership took shape in a dream of initiative co-founder Bob Freeman, a past president of the synagogue now on the property, Temple Israel. For years, he had joined his rabbi in monthly meetings with Muslims and Christians in Omaha.

“We started to trust each other, kind of like each other, socialize together some and have a shared vision of what we might be able to do,” said Freeman, a lawyer who drafted the memorandum of understanding that…