Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran (36 page)

“Not at all!” Nargess exclaimed. “They were ignorant people. And they were justified. We were burning their flag. Our culture was hurting their culture.”

I couldn’t win. The Islamic Republic’s anti-Semitism goes deeper even than cultural stereotypes. It stems directly from interpretations of the Koran and other teachings that have been passed along for centuries. The Koran reveres the prophets of Judaism, but it also refers to the Jews of Mohammad’s time as the Muslims’ “worst friends.” The Jews are portrayed in some interpretations and sayings as money-grubbing materialists who betrayed Moses and were responsible for the death of Jesus. That anti-Semitism was matched fourteen centuries later by Khomeini’s rhetoric. “From its very inception, Islam has been afflicted by Jews,” he said in a lecture in 1970. “From the very beginning, they launched their hostile activity by distorting the good name of Islam . . . by slandering and spreading lies against it.”

Still, the Jews of Iran manage to maneuver in the Islamic Republic. There are some professions in which Jews are accepted—business, medicine, engineering, law. But there are limits. Jews can become lawyers but not judges; they can serve in the army but will never get promoted to a meaningful rank.

Every year during the Jewish holidays, newspapers print stories about how content the Jews of Iran are. Like this one written by the official Iranian news agency during Passover one year: “The Jewish community of Tehran, in a message issued here Wednesday, salutes the advent of Passover feasts. . . . Wishing success for the leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, President Mohammad Khatami, and the Iranian nation in the new Iranian year, the Jewish community renewed its ancient and close ties with all Iranian people.”

But Iran does not recognize the existence of Israel and sees Zionist plots everywhere. One of the most prominent murals in central Tehran is a giant portrait of Fathi Shaqaqi, whom the Islamic Republic considers a hero. Shaqaqi, a leader of the Palestinian guerrilla group Islamic Jihad, was assassinated by Israeli agents in Malta in 1995 after his organization carried out a series of suicide bombings against Jewish civilians.

Leaders of the Jewish community in Iran, however, do not complain—at least not to outsiders. They have told me that the Jews have absolutely no problems making their way through the thicket of the Islamic Republic. That’s what Haroun Yeshayaei, a film producer and chairman of the Central Jewish Community, said when I visited him at the dingy, depressing Jewish Community Center in central Tehran.

I sat down with Yeshayaei at a table covered by a plastic tablecloth sticky with sugar. He is a gregarious man who agreed to an interview only after the Ministry of Islamic Guidance sent him a letter authorizing him to talk. He shook my hand—he was not a Muslim, after all—and offered me tea. Yeshayaei explained that the key to survival as a Jew in Iran is to compartmentalize—to wall out the official rhetoric of hate about Zionist plots and Israeli evil. He insisted, implausibly, that life is better for Jews now than it had been in the days of the monarchy. “We have the same synagogues, the same schools, the same traditional food,” he said. “Our religious life is a lot more organized than it was. The synagogues are more crowded, the people more religious. The more the Muslims got Muslim, the more the Jews got Jewish. The only thing the Jewish community has to do to is keep out of politics.” And Muslims like Jews, especially Jewish doctors, he said. Even though the staff at the Jewish hospital in Tehran is entirely Jewish, more than 90 percent of the patients are Muslim.

Yeshayaei acknowledged what I had heard at the synagogue, that it is more difficult for a Jew to get a job than for a Muslim. “In this economy, it’s hard for
anyone
to get a job,” he said. “But especially hard for the Jews. If there is a vacant job and a Muslim and a Jew are equally qualified, the job will go to the Muslim.”

He had a ready reply for every question. He likened the ban on travel to Israel to the restrictions on Iranian Muslims traveling to Saudi Arabia, which requires special government permission. “And for a while, no Iranian could go to Thailand either, because of all the prostitution there,” he said.

I asked him why so many Iranian Jews want to move to the United States. “Ask any Muslim in Iran and he’ll tell you he wants to go to America!” he said. “Ask half the people in the world and they’ll tell you they want to live in America.”

“The Jews are doing fine,” Yeshayaei said. “They’re mostly middle-class professionals.” He reserved his bitterness for those Jews who, he said, have abandoned their country. “In Iran we don’t have rich Jews anymore,” he said. “They have taken their money to the States and left us miserable here. There are many, many rich Jews who left. I say this as an Iranian, not as a Jew.”

Down the hall is the office of Manouchehr Eliassi, an Iranian-educated gastroenterologist and, when I met him, the designated Jewish member of Parliament. Eliassi is adamant about his Iranianness. “I’m an Iranian and I have all the same problems other Iranians have,” Eliassi said. “I was born and educated here. I’m the representative of my medical business at the tax office—not as a Jew, but as a citizen. My sister lives in L.A. My brothers-in-law live in New York. One’s a doctor in Queens. But my blood is in this country. Even Jews who have left the country feel this way. My sister counts the days and nights left before her visits here.” Eliassi’s words help to explain the tie that had kept so many Jews in Iran. For the Zoroastrians, the Armenians, the Bahais, and the Jews, the one constant the Islamic Republic can count on is that, deep down, they also feel Iranian.

His most active role in Parliament, he said, came in 1998 when he helped draft a much-debated bill to segregate medical treatment for men and women.

“So how did you vote?” I asked.

“I prefer not to tell you,” he said. “Voting is done by secret ballot.”

Again, it was the direct question not answered. Perhaps revealing his vote on such a sensitive issue might have aroused suspicion among his colleagues and given strength to his enemies. So I tried a different tack.

“Do you treat women patients?” I asked.

“Of course,” he said.

“So I can guess how you voted.”

“You guessed right.”

“Then why did you help draft the bill?” I asked. He looked me in the eye and smiled. Don’t cross the line, his eyes told me.

Perhaps it was this ambiguity that led the Jewish electorate to reject him for a second term in the parliamentary elections in 2000. Or perhaps it was his inability to resolve a much larger crisis within the Jewish community.

Two weeks after my meetings with Yeshayaei and Eliassi, the arrest of thirteen Jewish men and boys in Shiraz and Isfahan was disclosed. They had been accused of spying for Israel, an offense punishable by death. Seventeen Iranian Jews, including two people who were hanged in 1997, had been executed as spies since the revolution. Among those arrested in 1999 were rabbis, store clerks, an electrical worker, a perfumier, and a sixteen-year-old boy. During their confinement, they were allowed almost no contact with relatives or lawyers.

Once the arrests became public, the battle lines were drawn. Some hard-line newspapers referred to the arrested Jews as “the group of spies.” But some reformist newspapers chastised the authorities, particularly Ayatollah Yazdi, then the head of the Judiciary, for calling them spies before they had even been tried. More than a year after their arrests, the trials began in closed session in a revolutionary court in Shiraz. Day after day, confessions poured out. “I was accused of spying for the benefit of Israel, and I accept the charges,” said Hamid Tefileen, a thirty-year-old shoe store clerk from Shiraz and the first to testify, in a confession later broadcast on state-run television. He calmly explained that he had been recruited by Israeli intelligence during a trip to Israel in 1994 and was paid each month for working as part of a “network” that gathered and passed along “political, military, and social information” about Iran. “Israel,” he added, “plays on the religious beliefs” of Jews.

Israel’s government called the charges “ludicrous and barbaric”; Tefileen’s confession and the ones that followed were denounced by international human rights advocates as suspect. The defense lawyers insisted that their clients’ rights had not been respected and petitioned the court—unsuccessfully—to open the proceedings to the public. On one level, the trials validated those in Iran’s Jewish community who felt there was no place for them in the country; on another, they highlighted an abusive judicial system in which due process and fair and open trials are not guaranteed for any Iranian citizen.

Even before the spy trials, the sporadic repression and lack of economic promise had produced a quiet desperation among many Iranian Jews. Many of those who wanted to leave, like Soviet Jews years earlier, didn’t want to go to Israel; they wanted to go to America. But without family ties, that was a remote possibility. Many had no intention of leaving, although the poorest among them, like desperate people anywhere, were perfectly willing to beg for help. I discovered that by accident with Sheldon and Cynthia Katz, two American tourists from New York, at a small, poor synagogue in Isfahan in late 1998.

Isfahan was once known as
Dar-al-Yahud,
House of the Jews, and as late as the nineteenth century was home to tens of thousands of Jews. Only a few thousand at most remain today. Behind a metal door and a brick wall on a busy street corner in the center of Isfahan, the Katzes and I found the city’s biggest synagogue. Unlike the main synagogues of Tehran, which are lively meeting places, even when they are down-at-the-heels, the synagogue in Isfahan is dirty and poor. We were the only visitors that day. A toothless old woman who answered the door ranted that the synagogue’s caretakers had stolen her job and were determined to starve her. She grabbed at us, blocked our way, begging God for mercy and us for money.

Then a rail-thin young woman with an acne-scarred face and waistlength hair emerged from the synagogue and embraced the Katzes. I’ll call her Leila. “You’re Jewish! You’re American!” she exclaimed. She and her sister proudly showed us around, pointing out the yarmulkes and prayer shawls, the Torah and holy books, the unlit crystal chandeliers hanging from the ceiling. She told us to ignore the old woman, who was making quite a racket with her ranting and her begging. “She’s crazy,” said Leila. “We take care of her, but she’s crazy. Don’t give her any money.”

We asked Leila if she knew how we could find the old Jewish quarter of Isfahan, and she offered to take us there herself.

As we navigated the narrow streets of mud houses in the old neighborhood on the other side of town, Leila’s story emerged in bits that didn’t add up. She boasted that she had a good job as a secretary in a doctor’s office and that Jews were treated well in Iran. She said that her family had lived in the synagogue as caretakers for fifteen years, that one of her brothers had died mysteriously two years before, when he was twenty-four, that her three other brothers had left Iran and settled in Israel.

“My dream is to move and live in Israel,” she said.

That’s all the Katzes needed to hear. They told Leila that they knew people in agencies in New York that could get her settled in Israel. “If you can get out of Iran we can help you go,” said Cynthia, pressing her business card into the young woman’s hand.

“I can’t afford to leave the country,” the young woman said.

“The agency will pay that too!” Cynthia insisted. “We’ll help you! We’ll help you!”

Nazila, who was helping with the translation, struggled to keep up as both sides competed to control the conversation. “She’s asking if anyone can help her financially,” Nazila said.

“Yes, we’ll get her financial help,” said Cynthia.

The taxi driver, a Muslim who had been quiet until then, offered his opinion. “The solution is not to leave the country,” he advised the young woman. “You should stay here with your family.”

Leila ignored him. But she came up with her own excuses for why a plan for her to emigrate to Israel wouldn’t work. “I would have to take the family there too,” she said.

“We can help your family too,” said Cynthia.

“They can’t go because they don’t speak the language,” Leila said.

“We’ll get Iranian Jews to translate,” Cynthia replied.

“No, it’s impossible,” she replied. “We don’t have a phone.”

“I’ll have them write to you,” Cynthia insisted.

Nazila finally figured out what was going on. Leila didn’t have a good job, and she didn’t want money to leave Iran to go to Israel. She just wanted the American visitors to give her a bit of money now, anything to ease the desperation of her everyday life.

“I’m already twenty-five,” she cried. “My sister and I are the cleaners of the synagogue, so nobody wants to marry either of us. Nobody even pays us for our work. My mother is very sick and she’s going blind. My father doesn’t work. At first I said my dream was to go to Israel because it is so difficult to live here. But I might have a life here. I’m Iranian. And with some money, I could find a husband.”

Her voice trailed off. The Katzes were speechless. Funding a young woman so that she could find a husband was not what they had in mind. But the young woman did not give up. She tugged at Nazila’s sleeve as we tried to say our goodbyes.

“I need money! I need money!” she cried. “I can’t leave the country. Help me with money!”

I thought of Leila’s plight and how it is like the plight of so many other young people in Iran, regardless of their religion. Leila had no intention of leaving her country. She just wanted to find a good job and a good mate.

The Jews have it good compared with the Bahais, who are officially considered heretics. They are the nonpeople of Iran.

Christianity, Judaism, and Zoroastrianism can be tolerated because their origins predate Islam. But Bahaism is different. The roots of the Bahai faith date back to 1844, in the city of Shiraz, when a young Shiite Muslim named Mirza-Ali Mohammad declared himself the long-awaited Twelfth Imam. The movement that eventually emerged attracted a large following among the Shiite clergy and was suppressed by the authorities. They considered the Bahai religion heresy.