Uncategorized
Conservative political activism has grown increasingly crusading. These Jews feel right at home.
NATIONAL HARBOR, Maryland (JTA) — A little more than a week ago, 120 Jews gathered at the Residence Inn in National Harbor, Maryland, to spend Shabbat together.
The Shabbaton, or programmed Shabbat, had a structure familiar to many observant Jews: Sabbath meals and prayer service options along with opportunities for group discussions and lectures. The vibe was also characteristic of observant Jewish gatherings on Friday afternoon: Frantic calls to family stuck in the Washington, D.C., area’s notorious Friday afternoon traffic, excited reunions in the lobby and a reverting to Hebrew-inflected Jewish vernacular.
“I come here to meet politically like minded Jews on a more spiritual level and for more like religious Jews, they express their political views and in a way that aligns with [their beliefs],” Jeremy Pollock, 33, said. “So it makes it all cohesive.”
The political views that Pollock alluded to are what set this Shabbaton apart from many others. The participants were there to attend CPAC, the annual conservative activist conference. And at the Gaylord National Resort conference center across the street from the Residence Inn, where the conference was being held, the atmosphere was starkly different.
The older, darker, slightly musty Residence Inn was packed with blocky furniture and buzzing with older staffers who were eager to help and to explain that yes, they understood about helping the Shabbat observant get to their rooms. In the conference center, the massive light-filled corridors across the street with overpriced eateries and harried younger staffers who were few and far between.
“This is a place for open dialogue on all topics,” said Mark Young, a Baltimore physician, noting that he still maintains a few of the liberal beliefs he grew up with, and would not hesitate to air them in the Jewish enclave. “I think it’s very much an open tent.” Pollock, who wears a kippah, said he has never been made to feel uncomfortable in his years of attending CPAC.
The attitude toward Jews at CPAC also felt different at times. One speaker called for mandatory Christian prayer at schools. Multiple sessions opened with Christian prayer. And “evil” was a word used repeatedly to describe George Soros, the Holocaust survivor, billionaire and philanthropist who funds liberal causes, and who even made it into the title of one of the events.
Paintings and prints depicting former President Donald Trump and Jesus are seen for sale on the first day of the Conservative Political Action Conference CPAC held at the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center in National Harbor, Maryland, March 02, 2023. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
Soros wasn’t alone. “Evil” was also used frequently to describe liberals, Democrats, transgender activists and RINOs (Republicans in Name Only).
But some Jews at the event said they didn’t mind that kind of language. Instead of feeling alienated by calls for Christianity in the public square, or bristling at conspiratorial statements surrounding a leading Jewish progressive philanthropist, Jews at CPAC demonstrated that they felt welcome at an event — and within a larger right-wing political movement — whose rhetoric and aims have grown increasingly assertive.
“If you look at the archives, almost every year one of the opening prayers is delivered by a Jew,” said Yitzchok Tendler, an Atlanta-based rabbi who launched the Shabbat gatherings at CPAC and who has long been involved with the American Conservative Union, which runs CPAC. “Also any religious language would not be too different from what is heard in legislatures across the United States all the time.”
The conference also demonstrated a commitment to opposing virulent antisemitic rhetoric on the right. Nick Fuentes, a Holocaust denier who Donald Trump had as a dinner guest last year (and who Trump later disavowed) attempted to enter the conference and was ejected.
“His hateful racist rhetoric and actions are not consistent with mission of CPAC,” Schlapp said in a statement. ”We are pleased that our conference welcomes a wide array of conservative perspectives from people of different backgrounds. But we are concerned about the rise in antisemitic rhetoric (or Jew hatred) in our country and around the globe, whether it be in the corridors of power and academia or through the online rantings of bigots like Fuentes.”
As an example of Jewish inclusion at the conference, Tendler referred to a panel at this year’s conference titled “A Rabbi, a Christian and a Cardinal walk into a Bar.” (The “cardinal” in this case was Deal Hudson, who is Catholic, which also makes him Christian, but is not a cardinal.)
Jack Brewer, a panelist who is a former NFL star, said “It’s up to the believer to preach the gospel of Jesus Chris, unabashedly.” Seated near him was his fellow panelist Rabbi Shlomo Chayen, a religious Zionist rabbi based in Tel Aviv who focuses his outreach on encouraging young couples to have a Jewish wedding.
Whether or not the references to Jesus made Chayen uncomfortable, that panel also showed one reason Jews may have felt at home at the conference. The moderator, Elaine Beck, a Christian podcaster, introduced Chayen by noting CPAC’s growing commitment to Israel, where it held an event last year.
“I want to say thank you for having me all the way from Israel, I want to to bless everyone here,” Chayen said, prompting a round of applause and oohs and ahhs from the audience.
The session also hinted at the tensions Jews face in negotiating such an event. Brewer advocated that schools, both public and private, should be required to offer parents the option of teaching children the Christian gospel.
“We should be demanding every single public, private school give parents an option to give their kids the gospel of Jesus Christ,” he said.
He also pushed for corporal punishment. “Some kids need their butts whooped!” he said. “Amen!” said Beck, to applause.
Chayen skillfully navigated what united the four people on the stage, a commitment to family. His work, he said, focuses on weddings and procreation. “Look at our children and grandchildren and know that we’re leaving behind the set of values that they will continue,” he said.
Another panel may have felt less welcoming to Jews — or to two Jews in particular. The session was titled “The New Axis of Evil: Soros, Schwab, and Fink,” referring to Soros’ Klaus Schwab, the founder of the World Economic Forum, who is not Jewish); and Larry Fink, the CEO of the investment firm BlackRock, who is Jewish.
Much of the panel focused on ESG funding, an acronym for environmental, social and corporate governance funding, and the perils of using political criteria to determine investment. (That principle wasn’t universally upheld: A panel just two hours later promoted investment in businesses that embrace conservative and Christian causes.)
Despite the title of the program, Soros was the only name to come up during the conversation between former Trump White House spokesman Sean Spicer, Heritage Foundation think-tanker and former hamburger chain CEO Andrew Puzder and Oklahoma House Speaker Charles McCall. Spicer cast Soros as a sinister, all-pervasive presence.
“In the title of this [session] is Soros, and one of the things that I find fascinating is over the last several cycles. George Soros has created this web where he has gone into state government, whether it’s secretaries of state, local attorneys, and started to help fund the elections of a lot of these organizations, a lot of these individuals,” Spicer said.
The singular focus on Soros, among a batch of billionaires who fund the left, and the imagery and rhetoric attached to attacks on him — he is often depicted as maintaining secretive control, sometimes as an octopus — has led Jewish organizations to call out the obsession as at least borderline antisemitic.
There were two sessions devoted to Israel, one after the other, and because of delays, they came hard on the arrival of Shabbat. One featured David Milstein, an adviser to David Friedman, the Trump administration ambassador to Israel, and another featured Eugene Kontorovich, a George Mason University professor, and Josh Hammer, a conservative Newsweek editor whom the Southern Poverty Law Center has labeled as “embracing the anti-democracy hard right,” who explained what they said were the stakes for conservatives in the current controversy over judiciary reforms in Israel.
Netanyahu’s proposed reforms, which would sap the Supreme Court of much of its power, have triggered a political crisis, sparking weeks of massive protests in the country as well as acts of civil disobedience.
Kontorovich and Hammer made the case that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu faced the same nefarious elites that riled the conservatives at CPAC. “In Israel, there is a deep state,” Kontorovich said. “There’s a small group of elite lawyers and technocrats that have managed to control the country.”
Kontorovich told JTA it made sense to get into the weeds with the CPAC crowd.
“I believe the U.S. should stay out of its allies’ domestic governance, and it is particularly foolish to take sides in what are largely foreign domestic partisan disputes,” he said. “But as I said in my comments, now that the Biden Administration seems to be weighing in on the reform, it unfortunately becomes an issue for U.S. foreign policy, which those who care about Israel should have informed positions about.”
President Joe Biden has expressed his concern that Netanyahu’s proposed reforms would erode Israel’s democracy, as have almost half of Congressional Democrats and a majority of Jewish Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Support for Israel was one element that underscored the necessity of a Jewish presence at events like CPAC, said Rabbi Yaakov Menken, the managing director of the right-wing Orthodox rabbinical group the Coalition for Jewish Values.
“If you look at both the right and the left, there are voices that want to cut off aid to Israel,” Menken said in an interview. “And we know that Israel is a bastion of freedom and democracy in the Middle East and unlike most other countries where a US military presence is requested, Israel’s willing to do the work and have the boots on the ground all by themselves, they just need help to be that bastion of democracy.”
Another factor was making clear to conservatives that the Jewish community was not monolithically liberal, Menken said. “Jews need to make their presence known, especially in value spaces where there is a prevailing Jewish narrative that goes in the opposite direction,” he said. “They need to see, meaning the larger audience needs to see, that there are Jewish people who stand with them on those issues.”
—
The post Conservative political activism has grown increasingly crusading. These Jews feel right at home. appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
Number of Holocaust Survivors Falls Below 200,000, Half Reside in Israel, New Figures Show
People with Israeli flags attend the International March of the Living at the former Auschwitz Nazi German death camp, in Brzezinka near Oswiecim, Poland, May 6, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Kuba Stezycki
The number of living Holocaust survivors around the world fell from 220,000 to 196,600 over the course of 2025, according to newly released data.
The Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference), a nonprofit organization that negotiates and secures compensation for survivors of the Nazis’ atrocities worldwide, unveiled its latest figures on Tuesday.
Tracking survivors across more than 90 countries, the Claims Conference found that 50 percent of them live in Israel, totaling 97,600. The country with the next highest population is the United States with 31,000, representing 16 percent.
Seventeen percent of survivors live in Western Europe, with 9 percent in France (17,300 people) and 5 percent in Germany (10,700). Meanwhile, 11 percent reside in former countries of the Soviet Union. Seven percent (14,300) live in Russia, and 3 percent (5,200) live in Ukraine.
Other countries with notable populations of Holocaust survivors include Canada (4,800), Hungary (2,800), Australia (2,000), and Belarus (1,600).
The Claims Conference describes nearly all — 97 percent — of remaining Jewish Holocaust survivors as “child survivors,” those born between 1928 and 1946, now with a median age of 87. The youngest survivors are 79, while just over 1 percent of them are over 100. Thirty percent are over 90, and most — 62 percent — are female.
Social services provide for a sizable portion of the survivors with 71 percent — approximately 139,000 — currently or previously receiving support and grants administered through the Claims Conference. Through its Basic Needs Fund, the organization provides for 67,600 who are not receiving monthly pensions, and the organization delivers “targeted food security assistance to the most economically vulnerable Holocaust survivors.”
These new figures were released a week before International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Tuesday.
They followed new data from the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust showing the number of schools in the United Kingdom memorializing the Holocaust has fallen by nearly 60 percent since Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, as such discussions have now been labeled “political” and “propaganda” by some pro-Palestinian advocates.
Last year, the Claims Conference released the results of an eight-country survey investigating Holocaust knowledge across the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Austria, Germany, Poland, Hungary, and Romania. The group found that 48 percent of those surveyed in the US could not name a single concentration camp used by the Nazi regime to imprison and murder Jews during World War II — including Auschwitz, the largest and most infamous of the Nazi camps. This figure fell to about 25 percent of those answering in the UK, France, and Romania. In Germany and Hungary, the level of ignorance reached 18 percent, while in Austria it hit 10 percent and in Poland it stood at 7 percent.
The same study found that many respondents did not know that the Nazis murdered 6 million Jews. The number of people who believed that 2 million or fewer Jews died reached 28 percent in Romania, 27 percent in Hungary, 24 percent in Poland, 20 percent in the UK, and 18 percent in Germany. In France, the US, and Austria, 21 percent of respondents expressed ignorance about the total death count.
A new survey released this month by the Claims Conference asked 1,000 Irish adults about their views on the Holocaust, finding that half did not know the Nazis murdered 6 million Jews and that 19 percent of young people believed accounts of the mass slaughter had been “greatly exaggerated.” Among all respondents, 12 percent said they had never heard of the Holocaust, a number that increased to 15 percent for younger adults. Of all adults surveyed, 8 percent said they believed the Holocaust was a myth.
Gideon Taylor, president of the Claims Conference, called this moment an “inflection point” in a statement and warned that “soon we are going to live in a world without Holocaust survivors, without a Holocaust survivor voice.”
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) also released research results last year which showed high levels of global confusion about the historical reality of the Holocaust.
The ADL found that “20 percent of respondents worldwide have not heard about the Holocaust. Less than half (48 percent) recognize the Holocaust’s historical accuracy, which falls to 39 percent among 18- to 34-year-olds, highlighting a worrying demographic trend. Respondents younger than 35 also have elevated levels of antisemitic sentiments (50 percent), 13 percentage points higher than respondents over 50.”
The Claims conference also revealed that worries about another potential Holocaust to destroy the Jews people were highest in the United States, where 76 percent of adults thought it could happen again.
Uncategorized
University of Toronto Jewish Studies Department Targeted With Anti-Israel Posters
Students walk outside one of the exam buildings on the campus of the University of Toronto in Toronto, Canada, on Dec. 13, 2025. Photo: Mike Campbell via Reuters Connect
Agitators at the University of Toronto kicked off the new academic year by tacking posters promoting anti-Israel propaganda near the Jewish Studies Department, continuing to fuel concerns of a hostile environment for Jews and Israelis.
The posters accused Israel of being a “colonial settler state” and claimed that Israeli officials have uttered the falsehood themselves. According to The J.CA, an online Jewish media outlet, the posters also came with QR codes linked to a website containing atrocity propaganda regarding Israel’s conduct in the war with Hamas in Gaza.
“Some claims reference the destruction of universities and the deaths of academics and students, without attribution to independent or verifiable sources,” the outlet said. “Several QR codes direct viewers to advocacy materials calling for political action against Israel.”
Speaking to The J.CA, a local Jewish organization said, “Posting highly charged political material outside Jewish Studies is not neutral. It sends a message to Jewish students that their academic spaces are contested and that their identity is inseparable from geopolitical accusations.”
The Algemeiner reached out to the University of Toronto for comment and is waiting to hear back.
The school previously faced antisemitic incidents and came under fire for refusing, in response, to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, which is widely used by governments, corporations, and nonprofits around the world.
According to the definition, antisemitism “is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.” It provides 11 specific, contemporary examples of antisemitism in public life, the media, schools, the workplace, and in the religious sphere. Beyond classic antisemitic behavior associated with the likes of the medieval period and Nazi Germany, the examples include denial of the Holocaust and newer forms of antisemitism targeting Israel such as demonizing the Jewish state, denying its right to exist, and holding it to standards not expected of any other democratic state.
In 2022, the university said it believes that IHRA’s definition “is both insufficiently responsive to many of the most troubling instances of antisemitism in the university context and in tension with the university as a place where difficult and controversial questions are addressed.” It added that “protecting these freedoms is essential to our university’s mandate and mission of discovery, research and education, which can only thrive in an environment of free expression and critical inquiry.”
Critics have argued the IHRA definition unfairly categorizes criticism of Israel as antisemitic. Proponents counter that the definition makes a clear distinction between legitimate criticism of the Israeli government and efforts to demonize and delegitimize the world’s only Jewish state. According to research and civil rights groups, anti-Israel animus has motivated an increasingly significant percentage of antisemitic incidents, especially following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel.
The University of Toronto has witnessed multiple examples of such outrages in recent years.
In 2021, for example, a student union at the Scarborough Campus passed a resolution which called for sourcing kosher food from providers that do not support Israel, a measure which would have effectively banned kosher food on campus, while a second motion was stripped of language proposed to protect Jewish students. The measure also endorsed the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) campaign — and, in another provision that would have marginalized Jews, pledged to “refrain from engaging with organizations, services, or participating in events that further normalize Israeli apartheid.”
Earlier that year, the University of Toronto Students’ Union (UTSU) voted to sign an open letter accusing Israel of “genocide and demanding the cancellation of trips to Israel. Then in February 2022, it endorsed a motion linked to the BDS campaign against Israel.
Campus antisemitism continues to affect Jewish faculty, students, and staff at colleges across Canada.
In November, a pro-Hamas mob spilled blood and caused the hospitalization of at least one Jewish student at Toronto Metropolitan University after forcibly breaching a venue in which the advocacy group Students Supporting Israel had convened for an event featuring veterans of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).
The former soldiers agreed to meet Students Supporting Israel (SSI) to discuss their experiences at a “private space” on campus which had to be reserved because TMU denied the group a room reservation and, therefore, security personnel that would have been afforded to it. However, someone leaked the event location, leading to one of the most violent incidents of campus antisemitism since Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel sparked a surge of anti-Jewish hostility in higher education.
Six suspects, including Qabil Ibrahim, 26, were ultimately arrested on suspicion of being involved in the incident and appeared in court this month.
Canadian Jews have been hit by a wave of antisemitic incidents, with at least 32 reported across five provinces in just the past week alone, according to data collected by the Jewish advocacy group B’nai Brith.
“Antisemitism in Canada is now accelerating at an increasing rate, spreading across provinces, platforms, and public spaces. That is a warning signal, and it demands more than piecemeal reactions” the group wrote on Wednesday in a letter urging Prime Minister Mark Carney to create a Royal Commission that would explore the problem and draft policy proposals for solving it.
According to the group’s latest audit of antisemitism in Canada released last year, antisemitic incidents in 2024 rose 7.4 percent from 2023, with 6,219 adding up to the highest total recorded since it began tracking such data in 1982. Seventeen incidents occurred on average every day, while online antisemitism exploded a harrowing 161 percent since 2022. As standalone provinces, Quebec and Alberta saw the largest percentage increases, by 215 percent and 160 percent, respectively.
According to the report, incidents included someone firing a gun at a Jewish school for girls in Toronto, Ontario; a man trying to burn down the Tzedeck Synagogue in Vancouver, British Columbia; and a newspaper in Quebec depicting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as the vampire Nosferatu, a Nazi-era trope.
“We cannot permit this to become normalized,” B’nai Brith Canada research and advocacy director Richard Robertson said in a statement. “Antisemitism is not only a threat to Jews — it represents a total repudiation of Canadian values. Those who foment hate against any marginalized group stand in direct opposition to our multicultural, diverse national identity.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
Uncategorized
Iranian Regime Crackdown Went Beyond Protesters, Hitting Bystanders Too, Witnesses Say
People attend the funeral of the security forces who were killed in the protests that erupted over the collapse of the currency’s value in Tehran, Iran, Jan. 14, 2026. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
Art student Arash was walking home through the streets of Tehran when a shotgun blast ended his life. He had not shouted slogans, joined protesters, or raised a fist.
A friend, speaking by telephone from the Iranian capital, described the moment in a voice cracking with grief: Arash fell instantly, lifeless on the pavement. He was 22.
The friend, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to fear for his security, said they had paused on the sidewalk to watch a protest in nearby Vanak Square when security forces in black uniforms arrived and began firing randomly toward the demonstrators.
Arash’s death on Jan. 8 is an example of what witnesses say has been a reality of the country’s latest anti-government protests — bystanders uninvolved in the unrest caught in gunfire, or killed as they tried to flee the chaos.
Reuters was unable to independently verify this account or similar witness reports of deaths during the state’s crackdown on the unrest, and could not determine how many of the thousands killed were bystanders or people merely near the protests when they were shot.
But accounts from families and witnesses suggest that indiscriminate force used by security forces to crush the unrest killed many civilians who were not participating, leaving relatives to scour hospitals, morgues, and detention centers for answers.
UNLAWFUL LETHAL FORCE USED IN IRAN, AMNESTY REPORTS
Officials in Iran could not be reached for comment about the deaths described in this story as authorities began blocking telephone lines and internet connections from Jan. 8, when protests spread nationwide. From Jan. 13, Iranians have been able to make outgoing international phone calls, while calls into the country remain blocked.
There was no immediate response to requests for comment sent to the Iranian UN missions in Geneva and New York.
Authorities have blamed the unrest and deaths on “terrorists and rioters” backed by exiled opponents and foreign adversaries, the United States and Israel. State TV aired footage of burned police and government buildings, mosques and smashed banks it said had been attacked by “terrorists and rioters.”
The US-based HRANA rights group said it has so far verified 4,519 unrest-linked deaths, including 4,251 protesters, 197 security personnel, 35 people aged under 18 and 38 bystanders who it says were neither protesters nor security personnel.
HRANA has 9,049 additional deaths under review. An Iranian official told Reuters the confirmed death toll until Sunday was more than 5,000, including 500 members of the security forces.
The protests began on Dec. 28 as modest demonstrations in Tehran’s Grand Bazaar over economic hardship and quickly spread nationwide.
INDISCRIMINATE FIRE REPORTED BY WITNESSES
Within days crowds in cities and towns were calling for an end to clerical rule, and state TV showed footage of what it called “rioters” burning images of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Amnesty International said in a report it had documented security forces positioned on streets, rooftops — including those of residential buildings, mosques, and police stations — repeatedly firing rifles and shotguns loaded with metal pellets, often aiming at unarmed individuals’ heads and torsos.
It said the evidence points to a coordinated nationwide escalation in the security forces’ unlawful use of lethal force against mostly peaceful protesters and bystanders since the evening of Jan. 8.
The unrest has posed one of the gravest threats to Iran’s clerical establishment in years, with US President Donald Trump repeatedly threatening to intervene if protesters continued to be killed on the streets or were executed.
Iran‘s judiciary has indicated that execution of those detained during protests may go ahead.
Numerous accounts from inside Iran, including from people who have since left the country, said security forces fired live ammunition indiscriminately, turning streets — particularly on Ja. 8 and 9 — into what witnesses likened to war zones.
Among the victims was Fariba, a 16-year-old girl described by her mother, Manijeh, as curious and full of life.
On a night when she went with her mother to a nearby square simply to observe, security forces on motorcycles attacked the protesters.
‘THEY KILLED MY CHILD,’ SAYS MOTHER OF 16-YEAR-OLD
Manijeh clutched her daughter’s hand and sought shelter behind a parked car amid the gunfire. In the ensuing panic, she lost her grip and mother and daughter became separated.
“I searched street after street, screaming her name,” Manijeh recounted, sobbing over the phone. “She was gone.”
That night, the family scoured police stations and hospitals. They found Fariba two days later in a black body bag inside the Kahrizak Forensic Medical Center in south Tehran, shot in the heart, her body cold.
Officials told the family that “terrorists” had killed her.
“No,” her mother said. “I was there that night. The security forces opened fire on people. They killed my child.”
Videos on social media showed footage of families searching for their relatives among hundreds of body bags in morgues and the Kahrizak Center. Reuters verified the location of the videos as Kahrizak Center, although the identity of the people and the date when the videos were filmed could not be verified.
A physician who left Iran on Jan. 14 said hospitals were overwhelmed with gunshot victims. In Karaj, west of Tehran, a resident described security forces deploying automatic rifles against protesters and bystanders on Jan. 8.
Similar accounts emerged from the western city of Kermanshah, where Revolutionary Guards used armored vehicles and tanks to contain demonstrations.
‘THEY SMASHED DOORS, CURSING,’ SAYS BROTHER OF MISSING WOMAN
In Isfahan, the brother of a 43-year-old man recounted holding his sibling’s blood-soaked body after security forces shot him. “His only act was sheltering teenage protesters fleeing into his shop,” said Masoud, 38, by telephone.
Like other Iranians interviewed for this story, Masoud asked for his full name to be withheld for fear of reprisals.
In another case, the family of Nastaran, a 28-year-old elementary school teacher in Tehran, spent days searching for her after she visited a cousin on Jan. 9 and never returned.
They found her body in a warehouse near Tehran. She had been shot by security forces, said Nastaran’s father.
Authorities allowed retrieval only on condition of burial in the family’s hometown in central Iran and pressured them to blame “terrorists” — a claim the relatives rejected, he said.
Another family in the northern city of Rasht said security forces stormed their apartment after spotting their 33-year-old daughter, Sepideh, watching protests from a window.
“They smashed doors, cursing and yelling. They detained her. We don’t know where she is,” said Morteza, her brother.
“My sister’s two young children cry for her; her husband has been warned of arrest if he keeps searching for her.”