A Jewish-owned store in the Iranian city of Shiraz, where about one-quarter of the country's 25,000 Jews live, was torched a couple of weeks ago. In recent months a Star of David was painted on the floor at the entrances to Teheran's main synagogue and one of the capital's universities, so that everyone entering would step on Israel's national symbol. A Jewish professor who chose to step around the star on his way into the university was fired.
Sounds of freedom. Iranian Jews blowing the shofar at the Western Wall.
Photo: Brian Hendler
In the 14 months since Mahmoud Ahmadinejad took office as Iran's president, graphic scenes of IDF attacks in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon are being shown over and over on television, much more so than before, says "Kamran," a former Iranian Jew who has been in touch with dozens of Jews who've left the country since Ahmadinejad took over.
Yet despite alarming incidents such as these, and despite Ahmadinejad's Holocaust denial and threats to "wipe Israel off the map," Kamran says the recent Jewish emigrants - who spoke to him in safety, after they were outside Iran - do not mention the president or any sort of new persecutions of Iranian Jews as reasons for their departure.
"Unfortunately [the anti-Semitic incidents and Ahmadinejad's rhetoric] don't seem to have an effect on the Jews there, it doesn't worry them," Kamran said. "They sit in Iran calmly. Too calmly."
Even the Holocaust cartoon exhibit mounted recently in Teheran, which has caused outrage throughout the West, goes unmentioned by recent Jewish emigrants. Apparently it has had little or no effect on the country's resident Jews as a whole, said another former Iranian Jew, "Shahnaz," who likewise is in touch with many Iranian Jews who've emigrated since Ahmadinejad became president.
"Iranian Jews don't have much awareness of the Holocaust," says Shahnaz. "They didn't grow up with the stories, it's not a tragedy that touches them personally, it's not part of their consciousness - certainly not for Iranian Jewish youth." She adds: "While Iranian Jews love Israel in their hearts, what Ahmadinejad says about Israel doesn't seem to bother them."
IN TELEPHONE interviews with Kamran, Shahnaz and other former Iranian Jews, a picture emerges of a 2,000-year-old community that has become so steeped in denial since the 1979 Islamic revolution, and so adept at walking between the raindrops, that they believe they can keep on maneuvering even through the Ahmadinejad era - which has brought a little more rain their way, but not, after all, that much more.
In fact, except for the few recent anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist incidents recounted above, life for Iran's Jews has not changed substantially for the worse with the new president, even though outsiders assume that his Israel-hating, Holocaust-denying obsessions have the community panicked, as if a noose is closing around its neck.
Shahnaz even sees economic signs that Iran's Jews, or rather its middle-aged and elderly Jews, are planning more decisively than before to live out their lives in Iran, possibly as a result of the economic growth brought on by sky-high oil prices.
"In the past, for instance, Jews wouldn't spend money to buy a new car because they told themselves they were leaving the country. But now they're investing, they're buying apartments, cars, luxury items," Shahnaz said.
"Ahmadinejad didn't do anything to the Jews so far. Despite everything he says in the media about the Holocaust and Israel, the Jews don't feel any pressure and most of the adults want to stay there. It's the youth who want to leave," she concludes.
The ability of Iranian Jews to shrug off the humiliations that Islamism holds for them would be hard for Jews in Israel or the West to understand. An illustration of this ability came in a phone interview with "Farjad," a college student who left Iran on his own about a decade ago, shortly before he was to be drafted into the army.
Farjad has no illusions about Iran or Ahmadinejad, and fears the situation there will get much worse for the country's Jews. Yet when pressed for specific incidents of anti-Semitism he'd experienced personally, at first he could only recall the time a radical Islamic high school administrator turned down his application for admission. It was only toward the end of our hour-long interview that Farjad remembered the morning assemblies at the school (which finally admitted him after Iran's lone Jewish member of parliament intervened on his behalf).
He described a typical school assembly as if it were no more than an ordinary daily aggravation, something he'd learned to handle. To me it sounded like a scene from 1984.
"All the students would line up and this religious leader from the school would read to us from the Koran, and talk against 'Zionists' and all that bullshit, and the students would start chanting, and I would join in. They would chant 'death to Israel' and I would chant it, too, even though of course I didn't believe it.
The Jews love Israel in their hearts, but you can't show it. You have to take part, you can't stand out. There were students there who didn't agree with the radicals, and students who did. I always tried to behave in a way that would make me acceptable to everyone."
THAT WAS in the mid-1990s. The fact is that Ahmadinejad's threat to "wipe Israel off the map" has been expressed in any number of ways, any number of times, by other national leaders going back to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1979. The only thing new about Ahmadinejad's threats is that he may be able to back them with nuclear weapons in a few years, but while this makes him much more of a menace to the outside world, it doesn't make him that much more of a menace to the country's Jews than most other leaders they've known.
Iranian Jewish apologists point out that theirs is the second-largest Jewish community in the Middle East, after Israel's, and that the level of open Jew-hatred, such as attacks on Jews and Jewish institutions, is incomparably lower in Iran than in European and former Soviet countries.
