by Hooman Majd
“Excuse me,” I said to the woman, who was eyeing me with some curiosity, “is Mr. Motamed here?”
“No,” she replied sweetly, “he’s not here yet.”
“Dr. Moreh-Sedegh, or Dr. Naim or Dr. Raffi? Mrs. Hasidim perhaps?”
“No, none of them are here. They’re probably coming soon though.”
“Thanks.” I stood in the courtyard waiting, occasionally looking into the synagogue but otherwise pacing directly outside and even stepping onto the sidewalk, hoping not to draw too much attention to myself, the lone Shia at the temple. One by one, and sometimes in twos and threes, men and women walked past me, entered through the gate, and stepped into the temple, the women using a separate entrance farther down the narrow courtyard. A small man in an elegant gray suit matching his hair color, his yarmulke fished out of a pocket and expertly positioned on his head, busied himself with straightening the notices on the bulletin board immediately by the front doors while throwing me an occasional glance. I stepped up to the board and helped him, pinning an errant flier back in place. He looked at me carefully.
“Can I help you?” he asked.
“I was invited by Mr. Motamed,” I said. “I’m a writer.”
“Mr. Motamed isn’t here yet,” he said in a friendly tone, “but please, go in and have a seat. No need to stand here outside.”
“Thank you,” I said, and I stepped into the air-conditioned temple. I searched through the box of kippahs by the door and chose a large size that I felt confident wouldn’t slip off my head without the hairpins I now cursed myself for not bringing, and I then took a seat at the front of the congregation, on a bank of theater-like chairs that were set up behind long tables stacked with plates of fruit, dates, and prayer books. The men sitting across from me stared but said nothing. The man who had invited me in walked along the tables, straightening the stacks of prayer books and moving things around, and occasionally whispering something to one or another of the congregation. One by one, more men entered through the doors, took yarmulkes from the box or from their pockets, a prayer book from the table, and sat down on one of the chairs. “Shabbat Shalom!” they each said loudly as they entered, to a muted chorus of “Shabbat Shalom.” One man stopped in front of me and said an emphatic “Shabbat Shalom!” clearly directed at his friend sitting behind me, to which the friend replied, “Chakeram!” in a strong Tehran accent and intonation, employing a street-wise Farsi expression literally meaning “I am your obedient servant,” but not an expression one might expect to hear in a house of worship, Muslim, Jewish, or otherwise.
As the crowd grew, I heard the occasional “writer” slip off a tongue here and there; clearly people were talking about my unusual presence, perhaps some less comfortably so than others, but mostly they ignored me. My eyes focused on the women’s section, where, to my surprise, only one woman, younger, very attractive, and with an extensive and expensive hairdo, had let her scarf slip down to her shoulders. She chatted with other women, all of them heavily made-up and dressed to the nines, but all of the other women obeyed the Islamic laws of the land demanding proper hijab, which in these circumstances happily coincided with orthodox Jewish notions of female propriety. As I was staring at her and the room was filling to capacity around me, a middle-aged man with a limp approached me. I looked up at him as he stood over me.
“Can I see you outside?” he asked.
“Me?” I replied.
“Yes, please.” I followed him out the doors and we stopped on the steps to the temple. “Are you a member of the Kalimi [Jewish] minority of Iran?” he asked. He used the preferred Farsi word for “Jewish”—that is, the one Jews prefer, although Iranian Jews are not uncomfortable with the word most of their Muslim brethren and the state officially use: Yahoudi.
“No,” I replied, “I’m a writer, and I was invited by Mr. Motamed.” I took out my press card, issued by the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, and handed it to him. He stared at it for a while and handed it back to me.
“It’s all well and good that you have this from Ershad [Culture],” he said, using the commonly abbreviated word for the ministry that issues credentials, “but I’m in charge here and nobody told me anything about this. Motamed would have had to send a letter, and I never received anything.”
“No problem,” I said, “I don’t want to cause you any problems. I’ll wait here outside for him.”
“No, no,” said the synagogue administrator, “please go back inside and wait there. But when the services commence, if you don’t have your host here, I’ll have to ask you to leave.”
“No problem at all,” I said. “But are you sure? I really can wait outside.”
“No, no, you’re my guest,” he said, employing ta’arouf. I walked back inside and he gestured to an empty seat by the door. “Please,” he said, “befarma’eed.” My old seat had been taken so I sat down at the new one, next to an old man, probably in his late seventies, with cropped white hair and big, 1950s-style glasses.
“Salaam,” he said to me, interrupting his prayers. He pointed to the page in his prayer book, a page with Hebrew on the top half and Farsi below it. “I’m reading from here,” he said.
“You can read Hebrew, then?” I asked.
“Yes,” he replied, “I can, like everyone else. But I don’t understand any of it of course, and neither do the others.”
“Sort of like Muslims who say their prayers in Arabic?” I said.
“Yes,” he chuckled, nodding his head. “I can read it, but I don’t know what it means unless I read the Farsi. See?” He pointed at the Farsi text. “It’s in Farsi,” he repeated, as if he were speaking to an illiterate person. “You can just read the Farsi.”
I learned that the chief rabbi of Tehran was not going to appear that night, for he was attending to services at another Tehran synagogue. Instead, a young man, almost shouting desperately over the din of loud prayer-chanting, children screaming and playing outside, and others just talking loudly, delivered a short and seemingly half-hearted sermon about the importance of family and community. He was followed by a boy, no more than fourteen years old, who did his best to chant another prayer without the benefit of electronic amplification. I felt a slap on my shoulder and spun around.
“Be a Yid for five minutes,” said a middle-aged man with a hearty laugh, “it won’t do you any harm!” (He had used the Farsi pejorative “Joo-oud” for “Jew,” which has no translation but is perhaps closest to something like “Yid.”) I laughed, a little uncomfortably, and nodded vigorously, and then turned again to smile at him and his friends, who were standing a few feet behind me and laughing out loud. I noticed, looking around the room, that only about half the men swayed as they chanted and prayed, which, I thought, made my rigid torso just a little less conspicuous. I faithfully stood up whenever the congregation stood up, and sat down as they did, although I did not utter “amen” loudly along with them (or “ameen,” as they pronounced it, and as the Arabs do).
As the services continued, I watched the administrator walk up and down, say a few words here and there, and then take to the lectern and recite another prayer, acting as the cantor. He seemed to pay no attention to me and was clearly unconcerned that I was still sitting in the congregation, an uninvited Gentile as far as he was concerned. Another old man, one who had been throwing glances my way ever since I first entered the temple, walked up to me from across the way and leaned over.
“If you’re waiting for Motamed or Raffi or Naim, don’t bother. They won’t show up, and you needn’t waste your time or anyone else’s.”
“They won’t show up, huh?” I said, looking him directly in the eye.
“No, they won’t. Don’t waste your time.”
“Thanks,” I said, looking back down at my neighbor’s prayer book. The old man walked away, a little hesitantly, perhaps disturbed that I didn’t immediately stand up and leave. My neighbor leaned over to me, and pointed again at the page in his prayer book.
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��See, this is where we are,” he said. “This is the prayer.”
“I see,” I said, and then looked up to see the administrator rushing toward me, his limp even more pronounced.
“What did that old man say to you?” he demanded in a frustrated tone.
“He just told me not to bother to wait,” I replied.
“Don’t listen to him,” said the administrator. “I’m in charge here, and you’re my guest. Stay as long as you like, do whatever you want, and don’t listen to anyone else. He’s just a nosey old man.”
“I don’t want anyone to be uncomfortable,” I said.
“No one’s uncomfortable, and you are welcome here,” said the temple administrator, ta’aroufing, but quite genuine. “Please,” he added, as he shuffled off. I felt another playful slap on my shoulder.
“It’s been longer than five minutes!” said the beaming man who had teased me before. “You’ve been Joo-oud for way more than five minutes!” He laughed heartily and stepped back to the wall. I turned and smiled at him and his friends for the second time, and put my right hand over my heart in the traditional Iranian sign of respect. They smiled back and bowed their heads.
A young man took a position immediately to my left, standing against the wall, and began to pray, shouting but carefully enunciating every Hebrew word, although with a Tehran Farsi accent pronounced enough that it sounded more like unintelligible Farsi slang to me. He had to shout even to hear himself, for by this time the noise the children were making in the courtyard outside the open doors had risen incrementally with the sound of the prayers being spoken inside, almost as if there were a competition to see who could drown whom out first. I felt my cell phone vibrate in my pocket and rushed outside to take the call. As I was speaking on the phone and trying to avoid children intent on crashing into me as they continued to scream at the top of their lungs, I spotted two very young, unarmed soldiers, army conscripts clearly, walk through the gates and take their positions against a brick wall. They stood there looking bored, waiting for the services to conclude, and as I finished my call, a stream of worshippers walked out of the temple, men through the main entrance and women from theirs. I fought the bodies and went back inside the synagogue, looking for the administrator. I found him chatting to a number of young men.
“Thank you very much,” I said, and shook his hand. “I really appreciate it.”
“Please,” he replied. “You are most welcome.” He did not mention the fact that no one had shown up to vouch for me, and that he had not bothered to expel me as a potential fraud. (In the spring of 2009 I sent my friend Richard Greenberg, an NBC producer, to the same synagogue, and a man, perhaps the same administrator, unceremoniously kicked him out, oblivious to his protestations that he was Jewish. Later, as he almost came to blows with the man, that man’s behavior made him ashamed to say he was Jewish, he told me.) I followed the congregation as they collected their children, ignored the two young sentries, and ventured outside the gates and onto the sidewalk. I stood there for a few moments as they milled about, the men’s heads suddenly magically bereft of yarmulkes and the women properly buttoned up, scarves covering their hair. There may be a synagogue behind those gates, I thought, but, after all, this is the Islamic Republic of Iran.
IRAN HAS BEEN officially called “Islamic” only since the revolution of 1979 toppled the monarchy, but it has always been an Islamic state, at least since the Arab invasion brought Islam to its largely Zoroastrian, but also Jewish and Christian (mostly Armenian), population. Shia Islam was made the state religion under the Safavid dynasty, whose kings ruled a resurgent Persian Empire from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. Jews, who had by then lived in Iran for at least two thousand years, came under renewed pressure to convert, but as throughout most of Persian history, they were spared the harshest of treatment (or even banishment) if they didn’t. (Iran’s history, however, is not completely devoid of waves of large-scale anti-Semitism or sometimes brutal repression of Jews.)
Unlike other religious minorities, Jews have always had a special place in Iran’s culture. Almost all Iranians, fiercely proud of their glorious past, can recite the history of Cyrus the Great, the founder of the Persian Empire and a king who freed the Jews of Babylon, providing them safe haven in his empire and even issuing an edict that they should return to the Promised Land and rebuild their temple. In fact, according to the Book of Ezra, Cyrus may have been the first Zionist, or at least Gentile Zionist, an ironic fact that President Ahmadinejad and his fellow Israel-obsessed hard-liners may either be unaware of or simply choose to ignore. But regardless of ancient history (or whether one should even read the Bible literally), Iran’s Jews have lived on the land continuously for millennia, and are perhaps, along with the Zoroastrian minority, the most Iranian of all Iranians, who, for the most part, can barely trace their heritage farther back than a few generations. (Birth certificates, and even last names, only came into existence with Reza Shah’s reign in the 1930s.)
It is perhaps partly this notion of belonging, a sense Iranian Jews have of nationhood right where they have lived for generations and generations, which makes those Jews who have chosen to stay in the Islamic Republic a resilient bunch. They are not easily frightened by a state that at times can seem inhospitable, if not downright anti-Semitic, such as when President Ahmadinejad’s government not only denied the Holocaust but even organized and hosted a Holocaust-deniers’ conference in Tehran in late 2006. Ahmadinejad may come across as an ignorant and bigoted anti-Semite, but even he and his cohorts go to great pains to profess respect for Jews and Judaism and to distinguish between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism being the official state line since well before the firebrand president was elected in 2005 (and even to some extent during the era of the Shah, who although he maintained relations with the Jewish state, never extended full diplomatic recognition to Israel).
Iranian authorities, when on the defensive about their perceived occasional bursts of anti-Semitism, are quick to point out, rather proudly, that Iran has had a guaranteed seat in Parliament for its Jewish minority since the constitution of 1906 (as do the Armenian, Assyrian, and Zoroastrian minorities as well, but not the Baha’is), as well as the fact that Iran has the second-largest population of Jews in the Middle East—second only after Israel, that is. But the history of religious minorities and how they would fare under an Islamic government, even an Islamic democracy, has always been a curious one in the thirty years since it was established. Under the Shahs, particularly the Pahlavi dynasty, religious freedom was guaranteed and in some ways religious minorities benefited greatly—especially the Baha’is, whose faith forbids involvement in politics—partly because they didn’t fall under suspicion of being supportive of Islamic anti-monarchy groups, who, along with the communists, posed the greatest danger to the state. The Jews of Iran, as another example, while living in a Muslim state never came under pressure or force to emigrate, like many Arab Jews did, from Syria and Yemen to Egypt and across North Africa, after the creation of Israel or after the subsequent Arab-Israeli wars.
The Islamic regime, first under Ayatollah Khomeini, continued the guarantee of religious freedom, as long as the religion was one of the state-recognized monotheistic ones, namely, Zoroastrianism (Iranians, even the clerics, recognize the Persian religion as the first monotheistic one and consider it a forerunner to the three major religions), Judaism, and Christianity, along with Islam. Despite that guarantee, and the relative protection religious minorities enjoy, there remains suspicion and even anti-minority sentiment (particularly against Jews but mostly against Baha’is), which the mullahs stir up when it suits them, but both are also deeply ingrained in many ordinary Iranians.
The accusation (and I call it an “accusation” because that is what it was) that President Ahmadinejad came from a family of Jews who converted to Islam, one that made the mainstream Western media in 2009, could have been leveled only by his enemies, some in the reform camp, or conservatives opposed to
him. The rumor was nothing new and it took on a life of its own in the turbulent post-election period, but the very accusation was anti-Semitic in its suggestion that either a president with a Jewish past was unacceptable, or Iranian Jews could not be trusted to owe a greater allegiance to Iran than Israel, something that resonated in Tehran considering that some people had already accused Ahmadinejad of helping, rather than hurting, Israeli interests with every anti-Zionist outburst. It reflects the kind of anti-Semitism that has always existed in Iran, not as dark or hateful as European anti-Semitism, but a sort of below-the-surface unease with religious diversity in a nation that is 97 percent Muslim.
THE ISLAMIC CONSTITUTION, written after the revolution of 1979 and under the close supervision of Ayatollah Khomeini, did not eliminate the religious minority seats in Parliament, but it did rename the body the “Islamic Consultative Assembly,” Majles-e-Shora-e-Eslami (from “National Consultative Assembly,” Majles-e-Shora-e-Melli). Critics of the regime assert that the name change alone indicates a Parliament no longer responsible to the people, but only responsible to God; however, the Islamic assembly of Iran continues to have, as it has had for over a hundred years, a Jewish member, elected to the post by other Jews, and presumably one who feels no discomfort in assembling to consult Islamically with his peers. Iran numbers its four-year Parliaments, and during the Sixth and Seventh Islamic Consultative Assemblies, the elected Jew in attendance was Maurice Motamed, an engineer by trade and the man who had invited me to the Yousefabad Synagogue for Shabbat services in the summer of 2008.
Maurice Motamed’s eight-year stint in Parliament, begun in 2000, covered both the reformist Khatami years and the first term of archconservative Ahmadinejad. During his term most Westerners came to realize that Iran had a Jewish representative in Parliament, and that there were even any Jews left in Iran, a credit to his outstanding efforts to be more than just the “token Jew” in an Islamic assembly. He not only fiercely defended the rights of his constituents, but also, and perhaps to the surprise of some of his Muslim peers, strove to be a full and active member of the assembly by joining (non-Jewish affairs–related) committees and commissions, such as the Energy Commission and the Australian Parliamentary Friendship Committee. During his term in office he was able to get the support of fellow parliamentarians (and the president) in overturning such discriminatory laws as unequal blood-libel payments (today Jews can claim the same amount of monetary damages in the case of accidental death or murder as their Muslim counterparts, something they were unable to do even under the Shah, and which made them by definition not equal in the eyes of the law). He was also able to persuade the government to permit, albeit unofficially, Iranian Jews living in Israel to travel back to Iran unimpeded and without fear of arrest.