Uncategorized
Bosnian Jews mourn Moris Albahari, one of Sarajevo’s last Ladino speakers
(JTA) — Moris Albahari, a Holocaust survivor, former partisan fighter and one of the last Ladino speakers in Bosnia and Herzegovina’s dwindling Jewish community, passed away at the age of 93 last month.
It is believed that he was one of four native Ladino speakers remaining in a country where the Judeo-Spanish language once flourished and was spoken by luminaries like Flory Jagoda, the grande dame of Ladino song, and Laura Bohoretta, the founder of a uniquely Sephardic feminist movement in Bosnia.
Bosnia’s small Jewish community — with barely 900 members throughout the country, 500 of whom live in Sarajevo — are mourning the loss of a living link to communal memory as well as a dear friend.
“From you, uncle Moco, I learned a lot about Judaism, about life, about nature and especially about people. About both the good and the evil,” Igor Kožemjakin, the cantor of the Sarajevo Jewish community, wrote in a memorial post on Facebook, referring to Moris as “Čika,” or uncle, a term of endearment in Bosnian.
“It is a terrible loss, especially for Sarajevo. Our community is very small, especially after the Holocaust,” Eliezer Papo, a Sarajevo-born Jew and scholar of Ladino language and literature at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “We’re not speaking just in terms of prominent members of the community, we’re speaking in terms of family members. Everyone is like a family member.”
When Albahari was growing up in the 1930s, the Jewish community of his native Sarajevo numbered over 12,000. Jews made up more than a fifth of the city and it was one of the most important centers of Jewish life in the western Balkans.
In his youth, the city was part of what was then the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Formed out of the borderlands between the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires, it was a multiethnic state composed of Croats, Serbs, Bosniaks, Slovenians, Macedonians, Hungarians, Albanians and more. Among them were many Jewish communities both Ashkenazi and Sephardic.
The unique mix of of Muslim, Jewish, Catholic and Orthodox Christian communities, with their mosques, synagogues and churches defining Sarajevo’s skyline, earned the city the nickname “Little Jerusalem.”
Speaking in a 2015 documentary made by American researchers, “Saved by Language,” Albahari explained that his family traced their roots back to Cordoba before the Spanish Inquisition, and through Venice, before settling in what would become Bosnia when it was part of the Ottoman Empire.
“We didn’t want to ‘just’ write an article about Moris or Sarajevo; we wanted [the audience] to see what we saw and hear what we heard,” Brian Kirschen, professor of Ladino at Binghamton University, who worked on the documentary with author Susanna Zaraysky, told JTA. “This resulted in a grassroots initiative to create the documentary.”
In the film, Albahari takes the researchers and their viewers on a tour through what was Jewish Sarajevo, giving glimpses of the thriving Ladino speaking community in which he was raised and explaining how ithe language would save him many times, when the Nazis and their Croat allies, the Ustaša, came to shatter it.
“In sharing your story of survival during the Holocaust, you opened doors that remained closed for decades,” Kirschen said in a memorial post on Facebook. “Some of your stories were even new to members of your family, but each survivor has their own timeline. While you experienced great pain during your life, from your story, we also learn about moments of kindness and heroism. Through your story, you also taught us about the power of language.”
Albahari wasn’t yet a teenager when, in 1941, Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy invaded Yugoslavia. The Nazis occupied the eastern portion of the country, including what is now Serbia, while they raised up a Croat fascist party, known as the Ustaša, to administer the newly formed “Independent State of Croatia” — often known by its Serbo-Croatian initials, NDH — in the western regions that included the modern-day Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The Ustaša collaborated in the Nazis’ genocidal plans for Europe’s Jewish and Roma comunities, and they had genocidal designs of their own for the Orthodox Serb communities living in the NDH.
To that end they established the Jasenovac concentration camp, which would become known as the Auschwitz of the Balkans. By the war’s end it had become the third largest concentration camp in Europe, and behind its walls the overwhelming majority of Sarajevo’s Jews — at least 10,000 — were massacred. Including Serbs, Jews, Roma and political dissidents of Croat or Muslim Bosniak background, as many as 100,000 people were killed in Jasenovac.
Albahari was 11 years old when the Ustaša came to deport him and his large family to Jasenovac. A former teacher working as an Ustaša guard in the town of Drvar, where the train stopped, warned Albahari’s father, David, about their destination, and he was able to help his son escape from the train.
The teacher helped guide the young Moris to an Italian soldier named Lino Marchione who was secretly helping Jews.
This was the first case when Albahari’s Ladino came in handy. Ladino is largely based on medieval Spanish, with a mixture of Hebrew, Aramaic, Turkish and other languages mixed in. For speakers of Serbo-Croatian, a Slavic language, it’s entirely incomprehensible. But for a speaker of another Romance language such as Italian, it’s not such a stretch to understand, and Moris was able to converse with his Italian savior.
With his family gone, he was taken in by a Serb family, and changed his name to Milan Adamovic to hide his Jewish identity. Still, by 1942, it became clear that neither as Adamovic nor Albahari would he be safe in the town. So he fled to the mountains.
“If there was [a battle] I took clothes from a dead soldier to wear, I lived like a wolf in the mountains, you know. Visiting villages [asking for something] to give me for eating, it was a terrible time,” Albahari recalled in “Saved By Language.”
He would only feel safe in villages under the control of partisan forces. Yugoslavia was the only country in Europe to be liberated from Nazi rule by its own grassroots resistance.
During his time in the mountains, Albahari joined up with a partisan unit aligned with the movement of Josip Broz Tito, who would lead Communist Yugoslavia after the war. By the war’s end, Tito’s partisans numbered over 80,000 and included more than 6,000 Jews, many in prominent positions, such as Moša Pijade, who would go on to serve as vice president of the Yugoslav parliament after the war.
Moris was out on patrol as a partisan when he came upon a group of American and British paratroopers. They raised their weapons at him, thinking he was an enemy. Moris tried to communicate, but he spoke no English.
When he asked the soldiers if they spoke German or Italian, they shook their heads. When he asked about Spanish, one perked up: a Hispanic-American soldier by the name of David Garijo.
In Ladino, Alabahari was able to explain that he was not an enemy but could lead them to a nearby partisan camp where they would be safe.
“Ladino saved my life in the war,” Albahari recalled in the documentary.
At the partisan camp, Morris received even bigger news: The family that he had assumed had all perished after he left the train were in fact alive. The former school teacher and Ustaša guard who had warned his father had met them at the next train junction to help them escape. Furthermore, around half of the Jews in the train car were able to escape using the same hole Moris used during his initial escape.
Ultimately the family all survived the war, unlike so many other Jews of Sarajevo.
“Where is Samuel, where is Dudo, where is Gedala? They never came back,” Albahari lamented, listing missing neighbors while walking through Sarajevo’s old Jewish neighborhood in the documentary. “Maybe we are happy because we are alive after the Second World War, but also unlikely because every day we must cry for these dead people.”
When Moris returned to Sarajevo, it was an entirely different place from the bustling Jewish community he had once known.
Gone was the sound of Ladino in the streets and alleyways of Bascarsija, the market district where so many of Sarajevo’s Jews had once lived. Gone were the synagogues — only one of the many synagogues that had existed before WWII still functions. Gone was the robust Jewish life that was once a central part of Sarajevo.
Moris was still only 14 by the war’s end, so he returned to school and ultimately graduated at the top of his class. He became a pilot and later director of the Sarajevo Airport.
In this new world, Ladino was spoken, if at all, only in the home.
“Always, when I hear Spanish, I hear my father and mother, and all the synagogues, prayers in Ladino and rabbis who spoke Ladino. But that is in the past,” Albahari says in “Saved by Language.”
Eliezer Papo, who is a generation younger than Albahari, recalled that in his youth Ladino had long been reduced to a language of secrets.
“Mostly, Ladino was used when the elders didn’t want youngsters to understand,” Papo said.
Only later, in the 1980s, did community members realize what was being lost and begin to gather to maintain their language, recount what Jewish Sarajevo had been like and share their wartime stories of survival.
“He never took his story to the places of revenge, but he took it and his life experience to a place of ‘Never again,’ not just ‘Never again for Jews’, but never again for anybody,” said Papo.
Like many Sarajevans, World War II would not be the last major conflict Albahari would see. Less than 40 years later, war would once again come to Sarajevo with the break-up of Yugoslavia.
From 1992-1995 the city remained under constant siege by Bosnian Serb forces looking to break away from what would become Bosnia and Herzegovina. Moris joined with other Jews of Sarajevo in working to provide aid to their fellow Sarajevans during the harsh period.
Sarajevo’s synagogue was turned into a shelter and a soup kitchen. The community ran a network of underground pharmacies and a message service allowing Sarajevans to get word to family and friends outside of the city during what became the longest siege of a capital city in the history of modern warfare.
“Moris was an inspirational persona to many members of Jewish community and La Benevolencija,” Vlado Anderle, the current president of that local Jewish humanitarian organization told JTA. “He was a man with such inviting spirit and energy.”
When the dust settled on the breakup of Yugoslavia, and the new Bosnian state rose from its ashes, Moris found himself once again in a new role.
During the communist era in Yugoslavia, religious activity was discouraged. Sarajevo’s Jews emphasized the ethnic character of Jewish culture rather than the religious one. In the new Bosnia and Herzegovina, that was no longer true. So the community worked to reconnect with their religious identity as well.
“Everybody looked up to the people who had Jewish upbringing before the Second World War,” Papo recalled. “This doesn’t mean that they were rabbis. Just that they knew it better than anyone else.”
Moris, whose formal Jewish education ended in his preteen years, was appointed president of the community’s religious committee.
As such it often fell on him to represent Judaism to the Bosnian society at large, often in a very creative way, according to Papo, who in addition to being a scholar of Ladino is ordained as a rabbi and serves the Sarajevo community as a rabbi-at-large from Israel.
In one case, while being interviewed on a major Bosnian television station, Moris was asked why Jews cover their head with a kippah or other hat during prayer. Moris’ response, or rather creative interpretation, as Papo called it, was made up on the spot.
Moris’ interpretation began with the ancient temple in Jerusalem where Jews once had to fully immerse in a ritual bath before entering.
“Since the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed it was reduced to washing the uncovered parts of the body only, before entering a synagogue, similarly to Muslims: the feet, the head, the hands…” Papo recalled him saying. But in Europe, as Moris’ answer went, they began to cover more and more of their body. “In Europe they started wearing shoes, so the feet were not uncovered anymore, and then they started wearing a hat, not to have to wash their head… you know it’s Europe, one could catch a cold if going out with wet hair…”
“A few months later, I came to Sarajevo, and found that everyone has heard this explanation and is talking about it, not just people in the community, but in the street,” Papo said. “And you know, I let it pass, I couldn’t correct them, it was just so beautiful. That was his genius.”
“Identity is all about telling stories. And Moris was one of the great storytellers of the community,” Papo added. And through his stories he expressed an identity which was “made of the same contradictions that Sephardic Judaism is made of, that Sarajevo is made of, that Bosnia and Herzegovina is made and that Yugoslavia was and is made of and that the Balkans are made of.”
Albahari is survived by his wife and a son.
—
The post Bosnian Jews mourn Moris Albahari, one of Sarajevo’s last Ladino speakers appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
He saved dozens of kids in Auschwitz — he kept it a secret for nearly the rest of his life
Growing up in Israel as the daughter of Holocaust survivors, Judith Richter was taught not to discuss the Shoah. While her mother was very open about her experiences, Richter’s father was more reserved, and Israeli society at the time looked down on European Jews for, as they wrongly assumed, not fighting back. It wasn’t until Richter was an adult that she learned her father had played a critical role in protecting children at Auschwitz-Birkenau — a secret she gleaned not from her father himself but from an article on Josef Mengele in a LIFE magazine that her husband happened to spot in a grocery store.
Erno “Zvi” Spiegel was 29 years old when he was deported from Hungary to Auschwitz along with other members of his family, including his twin sister Magda. As a twin, Spiegel was selected to be a subject for Mengele’s scientific experiments, where he injected subjects with diseases and cancer cells to study their effects on the human body; due to their shared genetics, one twin could serve as a control for the experiment. If one died from the procedure and the other didn’t, the surviving twin would still be killed and subject to an autopsy to understand why they lived.
Mengele also charged Spiegel with looking after the other kids he was experimenting on, whose lives Spiegel would end up saving multiple times. The PBS documentary The Last Twins, directed by Perri Peltz and Matt O’Neill, captures the deep and unexpected relationship Spiegel had with his charges through interviews with the surviving sets of twins from Mengele’s lab along with Spiegel’s family. Uncle Spiegel, as the twins called him, was the only adult that many of the kids trusted during their imprisonment.
When SS physician Heinz Thilo ordered the extermination of all sets of twins, Spiegel was able to intervene by telling Mengele that his subjects were at risk. Sometimes siblings were mistakenly brought in as twins, but Spiegel lied about their birth days so they wouldn’t be sent to the gas chambers. Many recounted how he would teach them math and geography to distract them from their horrific conditions.
When she heard these stories for the first time, Richter told me, she was not surprised her father had put such an emphasis on education, even in the camps.
“My father taught me since I was very young that while your material possessions, home, even your freedom can be taken away from you, the single asset that cannot be taken away from you is your knowledge,” she said.
After Auschwitz was liberated, Spiegel led the kids on an arduous journey through Eastern Europe helping them return to their homes — or at least, to what was left of them.
Although Spiegel, who died in 1993, never told his own children what he had done during the war, he spoke with LIFE Magazine for their 1981 article on Mengele’s experiments. The LIFE piece didn’t just cause revelations for Spiegel’s family; one of the survivors, Peter Somogyi, saw the issue, prompting him to contact Spiegel. The two reunited for the first time in almost four decades in Boston, and after that, Spiegel arranged meetings with a number of the other surviving twins.
Richter began researching her father’s story and the lives of those he had saved for an academic project. However, when director Peltz’s mom, who had known Richter for years, connected the two women, Richter realized the importance of turning her father’s story into a movie.
Directors O’Neill and Peltz, who had previously worked together on the documentary Can’t Look Away: The Case Against Social Media, knew the project was time sensitive given how few living survivors are left. Since they first started shooting the film almost a decade ago, all but one of their interview subjects has died. O’Neill added that today’s political climate contributed to the urgency of getting the film to the public.
“At a time of rising antisemitism, of misinformation of the Holocaust,” O’Neill said, “it’s an essential time for journalistic work based entirely on indisputable truths to come out.”
Peltz noted that Spiegel’s heroism wasn’t embodied in one grand act, but “in the step by step, day by day.” Although Mengele’s horrific experiments get a brief mention, the filmmakers chose to focus on the uplifting story of how people came together and protected each other in the midst of tragedy.
“Right now, many of us feel overwhelmed by world events, by things that feel out of control,” O’Neill added. “This is a story of hope in a time of horror and of a man who took the small space that he could control and did good within it.”
In 2017, Richter organized a reunion of the survivors in Israel, where they dedicated a plaque to Spiegel and the twins in Jerusalem. Richter said her father’s strong sense of social responsibility had a profound effect on her life. She noted that in the homes of some Holocaust survivors, the “children grow up with a very strong sense of revenge.” Instead, her father taught her that the best response to hatred was to ask herself how she could help other people.
“Erno was a fighter in his own way,” O’Neill said. “He fought the Nazis by teaching the kids to call each other by their names. He fought the Nazis by teaching them geography. He fought the Nazis by giving them humanity in darkness.”
The Last Twins will be available to stream on pbs.org on April 13 and have a broadcast premiere on Monday, June 15 at 10/9c.
The post He saved dozens of kids in Auschwitz — he kept it a secret for nearly the rest of his life appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
I’m probably going to be on the government’s list of Jews at UPenn
When I graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 2024, tensions on campus about Israel and Gaza felt hotter than ever. Nearly every week of my senior year, another student or faculty member was being doxxed online for their politics. In the middle of spring finals, police forcibly disbanded the pro-Palestinian encampment in the center of campus. A week later, and four days before graduation, pro-Palestinian activists occupied a campus building, leading to another confrontation with law enforcement and arrests. At graduation, several students whipped out Palestinian flags and signs about justice for Palestine as they walked the stage.
I will once again be a Penn student come fall, having been accepted to the school’s sociology Ph.D. program. Last month, when I returned to campus for the department’s open house, I was surprised that I didn’t notice even a trace of the conflict I had left behind. The fences that had been erected around College Green to prevent a second encampment were gone. There were no cardboard signs about Palestine or Israel on Locust Walk. Talking with my professors and friends still at Penn, they confirmed that pro-Palestinian activism on campus had died down, likely due to a mix of intimidation on the part of the school administration — which only got more intense after the federal government got involved — and a loss of energy in activist spaces.
It’s not that students became completely disconnected: The university still offers clubs for students with a wide range of political perspectives, and courses on Israel and Gaza. But it seemed like the Penn I would be returning to in August had established some semblance of calm, albeit in part due to the university restricting open expression.
Now, the recent ruling that Penn must comply with the federal government’s demand for a list of students and faculty affiliated with Jewish groups and organizations — a sweeping categorization that could include anyone involved in Jewish Studies or Jewish associations regardless of their actual identity — could threaten to bring back the campus wide anxieties when doxxing and harassment were at their highest.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s investigation began in December of 2023, with a stated goal of determining if the university was failing to properly protect Jewish employees from discrimination and harassment. In March 2025, the EEOC asked Penn for membership lists of Jewish campus groups and names of Jewish Studies employees. Penn refused, instead offering to inform all employees about the investigation and how to contact the EEOC if they felt like they had an incident to report. This didn’t satisfy the EEOC, leading to subpoenas, lawsuits and countersuits. And it’s not over yet: Penn has indicated the school plans to appeal the decision forcing the handover of student and faculty names.
Although the EEOC’s jurisdiction is workplace discrimination, some of the lists the EEOC are asking for include students. One such group is those who were involved in confidential listening sessions conducted by the university’s antisemitism task force where Jewish students shared their experiences on campus.
I’ll go ahead and get ahead of the EEOC and make it known that I attended one of these listening sessions. Their confidentiality made them one of the few places on campus where Jewish students could feel comfortable openly discussing their feelings about the situation in Israel and Gaza as well as events at Penn. It was the administration’s way of giving Jews room to be vulnerable — and now the government is weaponizing it against the university.
The irony is stark. Under the auspices of protecting the interests of Jewish students and faculty, the EEOC is threatening the sanctity of the spaces where Jewish students and faculty feel safe.
For me, it’s hard not to feel like part of how we got here is that different political camps of the Jewish community could never seem to figure out how to speak to one another after Oct. 7. There was never really a clear idea of what Jewish students wanted political activity on campus to look like, with some advocating for a complete ban of encampments and anti-Israel referendums and others fully supporting them. Ultimately, I think what most people wanted on campus was a sense of civility, the feeling that screaming matches between pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian students wouldn’t constantly erupt in the middle of campus, but different factions were too busy arguing with each other to make a well-thought-out plan for how to achieve that.
The faculty who originally complained to the EEOC clearly thought getting the federal government involved was the catch-all solution. But instead, after two of the four classes of undergraduate students who lived through the conflict have graduated, and students are talking to each other in organized dialogue, the EEOC wants to revisit old wounds. The EEOC has discretion when it comes to what steps they choose to take, including issuing a subpoena and determining how to gather information they believe is necessary to their investigation. They have decided to use that discretion to gather information in a way that resurfaces generational trauma for Jews.
After such a period of divisiveness at Penn, it’s telling that an unidentified professor told the student paper The Daily Pennsylvanian that “a remarkably ideologically, religiously, and politically diverse array of organizations and individuals have united” against the subpoena. I didn’t always see eye to eye with the Penn Hillel leadership while I was an undergraduate student, but I agree with their assertion, in the statement they released last week that, “accountability in the face of discrimination is essential, but it must not be achieved by compromising the security of any minority community.”
Despite all the anxiety and frustration this development has provoked, I am choosing to look on the bright side: It seems like Penn’s Jews have finally found something they can unite over.
The post I’m probably going to be on the government’s list of Jews at UPenn appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Iran’s regime is obsessed with Jeffrey Epstein
In the hours leading up to the recent ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran, pro-regime AI-generated videos flooded social media. In one widely circulated clip, a Lego version of Donald Trump is shown desperately pleading with Iran for a ceasefire. The response comes in the form of a ballistic missile with the words “in memory of the victims of Epstein’s Island” written on it, hurling toward U.S. allies in the region.
Another video shows a terrified Trump in bed with young girls, having a nightmare of an Iranian missile barrage before waking and agreeing to ceasefire terms while eating a taco — a reference to the acronym “TACO” (“Trump Always Chickens Out”).
These videos are just some of the dozens released by media organizations affiliated with the Iranian regime that invoke pedophile sex abuser Jeffrey Epstein in its anti-Western propaganda.
“The IRGC is very happy to use him in every venue they have—in media, newspapers, speeches,” said Saeid Golkar, an Iranian-born expert on the Iran regime’s propaganda, using the acronym for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. “Everything they are talking about, especially right now, goes back to the corruption of the West and Epstein.”
Golkar, who grew up exposed to regime messaging, said the fixation on Epstein reflects a broader ideological goal: convincing Iranians that the West is a place of moral decay.
“From the beginning, one of the pillars of the Islamic Republic’s ideology was anti-Westernism and portraying the West as a corrupt place,” he said. “There is no respect for families or values … no limitation for sexual interaction. I remember the phrase ‘living like pigs’ — that they are living together like animals. That was a big concept.”
Golkar says the Epstein files released by the U.S. Department of Justice earlier this year have been a “gift” to the regime, offering a concrete example of the Western immorality it hopes to present to its people. When Iranians express a desire for a “normal life” without Sharia law or morality police, the regime invokes Epstein.
“They say, ‘You don’t want a normal life — you want a corrupted life…. These people don’t care about your freedom. They are a group of pedophiles.’” This, despite the fact that girls can be legally married in Iran at the age of 13, and even younger with the approval of a male guardian and judge.
The Baal game
One of the most prominent features of pro-regime rallies in Iran is the burning of Baal statues. The figure of Baal — meaning “lord” in ancient Semitic languages — is referenced in the Old Testament as a rival to the God of the Israelites. Historically, Baal was a fertility deity associated with rain and agricultural prosperity. Later interpretations and conspiracy theorists came to portray the worship of Baal as tied to sexual deviance and child sacrifice.
A popular online conspiracy theory ties Jeffrey Epstein and his co-conspirators to Baal, pointing to a viral document from the Epstein files that appears to show bank transfer details with the name “Baal.name” listed where a financial institution would typically appear. They interpret this as evidence that Epstein maintained an account connected to the deity, suggesting he may have worshiped Baal or been involved in ritual abuse. Popular right-wing influencer Candace Owens weighed in with a video titled, “BAAL SO HARD: The Epstein Files,” where she referred to Jews as “pagan gypsies.” It has almost 3 million views.
Fact-checkers have disputed the interpretation of the bank document, noting that “Baal.name” is likely a misreading or formatting artifact of “Bank Name,” and that the actual account name — Clearlake Centre, LLC — is clearly identified elsewhere in the record.
On numerous occasions, the Iranian regime has staged the burning of Baal statues in major cities during pro-regime rallies, sometimes even coordinating multiple burnings across the country. Mehr News Agency, a state-owned Iranian news network, reported on one such rally in early February, writing: “Participants set fire to the symbolic Baal idol, describing the act as a representation of condemnation over crimes linked to Jeffrey Epstein’s island, where children were abused.”
These events are often accompanied by chants of “Death to America,” “Death to Israel,” or “God is Great.” In some cases, the statues have been marked with a painted Star of David.
The Baal figure has also appeared in many of the AI-generated videos circulating online amidst the war. In one, created by pro-regime media organization Explosive Media, Lego versions of a drunken Pete Hegseth and Trump are paired with a rap track: “We hitting the Baal-worshipping Epstein Island crew, the ones who hurt the kids. Revenge for every American soul you and Trump’s dirty crew oppressed and did. We taking payback for the girls you broke.”
Though Explosive Media claims it is not directly affiliated with the Iranian government, Golkar said he has seen evidence suggesting it operates as part of the IRGC’s media apparatus. The regime has also acknowledged granting tiered internet access to select individuals tasked with amplifying official messaging. In early March, government spokesperson Fatemeh Mohajerani said full internet access had been given to those “who can carry the voice of the government further.” Explosive Media, which says it has 2.5 million followers across Iranian messaging platforms, has cited its status as a media organization to explain its continued access. This has prompted experts like Moustafa Ayad, a researcher with the Institute of Strategic Dialogue, to raise questions about how closely it is connected with the state.
Another video, played on Iranian state TV, depicts figures the regime frames as victims of the West — a Native American man, a Gazan child, an Epstein victim, and former Iranian general Qassem Soleimani, who was killed in a US strike in 2019 — gazing skyward as an Iranian missile strikes the Statue of Liberty. In this version, the statue is reimagined as Baal holding a Talmud. Upon impact, both sink into the Hudson River.
The Epstein fixation extends beyond rallies and social media. Golkar said Epstein is frequently referenced in official Basij (a plainclothes paramilitary volunteer militia in Iran) and IRGC materials, as well as in speeches by Iranian officials. Just two days before his assassination, Ali Larijani, Iran’s top security official, posted on X, “It has been reported that what remains of Epstein’s network is working to prepare a conspiracy aimed at fabricating an incident similar to the September 11 attacks, in preparation for accusing Iran of being behind it.”
In another post in response to U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Laranjani posted on X, “Mr. Hegseth! Our leaders have been, and still are, among the people. But your leaders? On Epstein’s island!”
The Epstein War?
These propaganda videos are largely made in English. With Iran still in a media blackout, the Iranian people may not be their intended audience.
Shaping global perception through media is a key part of the Iranian war strategy. In a meeting with a group of Iranian poets in 2024, Ayatollah Khamenei, who was assassinated on the first day of the war, stated, “All war is a media war. Whichever actor has greater media influence will achieve their goals.”
The IRGC has spent years building a media apparatus designed to do just that. IRGC-affiliated production studios, media-focused university programs, and cultural centers are dedicated to training and refining propaganda content. Iran also outsources some of its media production to countries more attuned to Western cultural cues, particularly Pakistan.
A key element of the regime’s narrative is the claim that the Trump administration initiated the war to distract from the Epstein files. This theory has also circulated on both the left and the right in the United States.
In Washington D.C., posters cover the streets referring to the War in Iran, formally titled Operation Epic Fury, as Operation Epstein Fury.
U.S. Republican Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky posted on X shortly after the war began, garnering over 250 thousand likes, “Bombing a country on the other side of the globe won’t make the Epstein files go away, any more than the Dow going above 50,000 will.”
The popular podcaster Joe Rogan espoused the theory on a recent episode, stating, “Look, the Epstein files comes out — we go to war with Iran. It’s a good way to get people to stop talking about certain things.”
The post Iran’s regime is obsessed with Jeffrey Epstein appeared first on The Forward.