The Iranian Jews Who Joined the Islamic Revolution
The Iranian Jews Who Joined the Islamic Revolution
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium.MAGAZINE-the-iranian-jews-who-joined-the-islamic-revolution-1.9088876
Thousands flocked from Tehran's synagogues to protests, led by their rabbis. Jewish delegates met with Khomeini to express support for his struggle. A groundbreaking study sheds light on the life of Iranian Jews, their complex view of Zionism and their surprising stance on the Islamic Revolution
Published on 22.08.2020
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Jews take part in one of the mass demonstrations that led up to the Islamic Revolution in 1979. From the Jewish newspaper “Tamuz”
At the end of 1978, a delegation from the Jewish community traveled to Paris to meet with the leader of the revolutionary movement, Khomeini. “The true goal of the meeting was to ensure that the Jews would not be considered enemies of the revolution, but rather its supporters,” Sternfeld explains. It was the first of many meetings between the two sides. Dr. Siamak Moreh-Sedeq, one of the hospital’s directors and until recently the one guaranteed Jewish delegate in the Majlis (the Iranian parliament), told Sternfeld that shortly before Khomeini returned to Iran he sent a letter of thanks to the hospital’s director for its help in treating wounded revolutionaries. To this day, in 2020, there is a plaque at the hospital’s entrance with the inscription, in Hebrew and in Farsi, “Love thy neighbor as thyself.”
On December 11, 1978, one of the largest demonstrations against the shah took place in the capital. Newspapers termed it a “demonstration of millions” and it became a milestone in the struggle against the regime. “Jewish participation [in the demonstration] set records,” Sternfeld writes, noting that “according to some sources, five thousand Jews participated in these protests.” Others estimate the number to have been far higher. “The Jewish religious leaders marched in the front row and the rest of the Jews followed them, showing great solidarity with our Iranian compatriots,” Sternfeld quotes a veteran activist in the Iranian Jewish community who helped organize the Jewish community’s participation. It turned out that the Jewish religious leadership legitimized and supported the appearance of young Jews in the demonstrations. “From the first days of the revolution, we had considerable support from religious leaders,” the activist said.
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There were also Jews who participated actively in the fighting, though their exact number is unknown. Some of them did so within the framework of their activity in Iranian professional organizations or in explicitly Jewish organizations. Others were active in organizations that were almost wholly Muslim and that supported the revolution. One of those organizations was Mujahedin-e Khalq (People’s Mujahedin Organization of Iran). One of the Jewish activists in the organization was Edna Sabet, who was born in 1955 to a Tehran Jewish family from the urban middle class, and many of whose relatives were engineers and industrialists who acquired their education in the United States. During her years of study at Ariyamehr Technical University in Tehran, Sabet began to become involved in political activity. Subsequently, in the wake of her Muslim husband, she joined the Mujahedin and became a prominent figure in the movement. The members of the movement fought alongside the revolutionaries against the shah’s oppressive regime, but after the revolution they were denied the right to take part in the elections and they opposed the new regime and were persecuted by it. Among those who suffered that fate was Sabet: She was arrested and executed in 1982, at the age of 27. What was a left-wing Jewish woman doing in an Islamic revolutionary organization in the first place? “Despite her tragic end, her story illustrates another aspect in the complex weave of identities and loyalties that characterized many of those from her generation,” Sternfeld says.
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“The unique ability of Iranian Jews to develop highly complex identities – and to be largely successful because of their sensitivity to nuances” was often confusing to those who observed them from outside Iran, Sternfeld writes. In this connection, he quotes Haim Tsadok, a Jewish Agency emissary to Iran in the last century, as saying that Iranian Jews and Iranian non-Jews share a common denominator of 90 percent, whereas between Iranian Jews and Israeli Jews there is a difference of 90 percent. “That common denominator is what impelled Iran’s Jews to struggle for their integration into Iranian society,” Sternfeld observes.
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