Live from Tehran: A Rare Peek into Iran's Jewish Community
By Gary Rosenblatt
March 3, 2021 | 7:28 p.m.
TEHRAN, Iran (JTA) — Mohammad Abaie clears his throat and begins reciting a blessing over a glass of wine. Dozens of people gathered for Shabbat services at the Yusef Abad synagogue in north Tehran join him.
The blessing, in Hebrew, is not hard to understand, but the tune is unfamiliar to most Western ears.
“This is the Persian Jewish melody,” Abaie, 69, tells me after the service. “It’s what we grew up with.”
Abaie, who edited a Persian-Hebrew dictionary and puts out a weekly Torah portion flyer in the synagogue, spoke with pride of how the community had kept Judaism alive despite the hardships of the 20th century.
“Even when the economy was bad, Jews didn’t close their synagogues,” said Abaie, who wore a neatly pressed black jacket over his crisp white shirt.
Certainly, Iranian Jewry has faced challenges since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, when many Jews fled the country amid anti-Israel sentiment. But Abaie said that in recent years, the government has shown more tolerance toward the country’s Jews.
In all, he said, Iran is home to about 35 synagogues. Ali Najafabadi, a spokesman for Iran’s Jewish community, said most Jews in Iran are shopkeepers, although he said others work as doctors, engineers and teachers.
Today, there are about 100 synagogues in Iran, 31 of which are in Tehran. Twenty of those are active. Since 1994, there has been no rabbi in Iran and the beit din, or religious court, does not function.
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