Jews in Iran keep a low profile \u2014 avoid drawing attention to themselves \u2014 and are expected to demonstrate loyalty to the Islamist regime to survive. During the annual Purim festival, this balancing act becomes especially difficult.<\/b><\/p>\n
Haman\u2019s attempt 2400 years ago in Persia to mass-murder the large Jewish population there is now being turned by the current regime in Iran into a massacre of its own defenceless citizens.\u00a0<\/span><\/b><\/p>\n Purim commemorates how the Persian official Haman\u2019s plan to exterminate the Jews of Persia\u2014men women and children\u2014was thwarted. An estimated 750,000 Jews lived in the Persian Empire at that time.<\/p>\n This year\u2019s Purim festival began just two days after the outbreak of war with Iran at the end of February, linking the holiday to modern conflicts involving Iran and groups it supports.<\/p>\n Before the 1979 revolution, about 100,000 Jews lived in Iran enjoying significant religious freedom under the Shah who maintained close links with the U.S. and Israel. Afterwards, life for religious minorities deteriorated dramatically. Many Iranian Jews were imprisoned on false charges of espionage, leading to mass emigration of them to the U.S. or Israel.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Today, fewer than 10,000 Jews<\/strong> remain who face considerable discrimination and limited political representation. A single seat in parliament is reserved for a Jewish representative, who, according to Iran expert Beni Sabti at Israel\u2019s Institute of National Security Studies, INSS, is a mere puppet.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n He regularly praises the regime, and calls Israel the \u201cZionist entity\u201d that must be wiped out, says Sabti to the Jewish online news outlet The Forward. <\/i>Jews also note they are subject to legal inequality, their testimony being less valued than that of muslims.<\/p>\n Accusations of \u2018Zionist Espionage\u2019 are still commonplace and can carry serious consequences. Since the start of the war more than 30 Jewish Iranians have reportedly been detained on charges of liaising with the Mossad or Israel, writes The Forward, <\/i>pointing out that community members often go to great lengths to show loyalty to the regime and keep a distance to Israel.<\/p>\n The country’s Jewish leader, Chief Rabbi Yehuda Gerami, has made public condemnations of the State of Israel and Zionism, and visited the home of Qasem Soleimani after his death. Soleimani, a key architect of Iran’s terrorist network in the Middle East, was killed by the United States in a drone strike in 2020.<\/p>\n Speaking to an American audience in the United States in November 2021, Gerami defended his statements by saying they were made out of concern for the safety of the Jewish community in Iran.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n At the same time,<\/strong> prominent Jewish civil leaders are used as \u201cpropaganda hostages\u201d by the regim, appearing in pro-government events like the Revolution Parade while others are arrested for alleged dissent.<\/p>\n Each year in the weeks leading up to Purim, a well-known state-sponsored narrative begins to circulate in the media, school presentations, TV-programs and academic articles, which reinterpret the biblical Book of Esther as a story of Jews massacring young and old Iranians including women and children, rather than Jews defending themselves by royal decree against armed gangs, leading to the death of 75 000 would-be attackers.<\/p>\n Historically, Iran has also been associated with Holocaust denial, particularly under former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who arranged conferences calling it a myth, drawing widespread international criticism.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Jews in Iran keep a low profile \u2014 avoid drawing attention to themselves \u2014 and are expected to demonstrate loyalty to the Islamist regime to survive. During the annual Purim festival, this balancing act becomes especially difficult.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":5520,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5544","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-jewish-holidays"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.israelreport.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5544","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.israelreport.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.israelreport.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.israelreport.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.israelreport.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5544"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.israelreport.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5544\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5575,"href":"https:\/\/www.israelreport.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5544\/revisions\/5575"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.israelreport.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5520"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.israelreport.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5544"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.israelreport.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5544"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.israelreport.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5544"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}