Uncategorized
As Iran’s Jews prepare for Purim, their government calls its story proof of a past genocide
At the center of Hamadan, Iran, one of the oldest continually inhabited cities in the world, stands the holiest site for Jews in Iran: a small brick mausoleum traditionally believed to hold the tombs of Esther and Mordechai.
For at least the past 15 years, the tomb has become a flashpoint for protest reacting to Iranian regime–propagated narratives that frame the Book of Esther not as a tale of Jewish survival, but as a genocide of 75,000 Iranians perpetrated by the Jews. Each year on Purim, protesters gather outside the mausoleum. At times, they have thrown Molotov cocktails at the building or burned Israeli flags.
Iranian Jewish leaders have responded with carefully worded appeals to the Interior Ministry, emphasizing their loyalty to the state and asking that protests not be held at the sacred site. And even as the possibility of a U.S.-led attack looms, Iranian Jews are preparing to celebrate Purim with discreet customs reflective of the culture at large — though with dispensation to consume alcohol at home.
Jews in Iran celebrate Purim “with a very low profile” because of “all this antisemitic propaganda,” says Thamar E. Gindin, author of The Book of Esther Unmasked and a research fellow at Haifa University’s Ezri Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Research.
Loyalty as survival
Before the Islamic Revolution, approximately 100,000 Jews lived in Iran and enjoyed significant religious freedom under the Shah, who maintained ties with the United States and Israel. Some Jews fleeing hostile conditions in Arab countries even sought refuge in Iran.
After 1979, however, Sharia law was imposed, political instability grew, and life for religious minorities changed dramatically. Several members of the Jewish community were imprisoned on false accusations of being Zionist spies. A mass exodus of Jewish Iranians followed, with many fleeing to the United States or Israel.
Today, approximately 9,000 to 10,000 Jews remain in Iran — the largest Jewish community in the Middle East outside Israel. While they are allowed to practice their religion freely, they face significant discrimination. Jews are barred from holding senior government positions, with a single parliamentary seat reserved for a Jewish representative who, according to Beni Sabti, an Iran expert at the Institute for National Security Studies, is a “puppet.”
“He praises the regime all the time, and he calls Israel ‘the Zionist entity’ and says it must be erased,” said Sabti, invoking the label commonly used by the state’s military opponents. Jews also face legal inequalities, including the diminished weight of their testimony compared to that of Muslims.
Accusations of Zionist espionage remain common and can carry dire consequences. While this has been the case since 1979, the situation worsened for Jews following the Twelve-Day War in June of 2025. Since the war, over 30 Jewish Iranians have been taken prisoner on accusations that they collaborated with the Mossad or Israel.
In an effort to protect community members, Jewish Iranians go to great lengths to demonstrate allegiance to the regime and distance themselves from Israel.
In January, Jewish community leader, Rabbi Younes Hamami Lalehzar participated in a memorial service for Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander Qassem Soleimani, who was killed by the U.S. in a 2020 drone strike. Lalehzar publicly praised Soleimani, who was a key architect in developing Iran’s terror network across the Middle East, and attended the event alongside Hezbollah and Hamas representatives.
According to Sabti, amid a recent wave of protests, the Jewish community has made a concerted effort to remain invisible. “They didn’t come out from their houses,” he said. If they do, it is just “to buy very basic products.” He said the community learned a painful lesson during the 2022 Women, Life, Freedom protests in Iran, which coincided with Jewish high holidays. During that time, “The Jews just went for synagogue. But when you go with your family or five, six guys together, it looks like a protest, and they were just arrested.”
During this latest round of unrest, the Iranian Jewish Community Association’s Telegram channel filled with carefully neutral messages announcing synagogue closures. “They said, ‘Don’t go to the synagogue.’ They don’t say why. But of course, all know why,” Sabti said — an effort, he explained, to avoid any gathering that could be misinterpreted as anti-regime activity. He added that pro-regime messages have also appeared in the channel.
At the same time, says Gindin, many in the Jewish community are being used as “propaganda hostages” by the regime amid ongoing protests and instability in the country. For example, Jewish community leaders recently participated in a pro-regime Iranian Revolutionary parade. “If they tell you to gather your people to protest against Israel, you don’t have the prerogative to say no when the lives of [thousands of] people are dependent on your collaboration with the regime.”
Despite these efforts, several members of the Jewish community have been arrested on suspicion of involvement in anti-regime protests. Senior community members have publicly denounced the demonstrations and denied any connection to them. Some have reportedly worked behind the scenes to secure the release of those they say were mistakenly accused.
Rewriting the Book of Esther
Each year, in the weeks before Purim, a familiar narrative begins circulating through regime-sponsored media, school lectures, television programs, and academic articles. “I saw it in a lot of blog posts when blogs were a thing. I see it in regime media. It’s really everywhere,” said Gindin.
The Book of Esther does not end gently. Its climactic scenes depict sanctioned violence against the enemies of the Jews. But it is widely considered not to be a verifiable historical account, and there is no independent Persian record of the events it describes.
According to Gindin, many prominent analysts, specifically well-known Iranian political commentator Ali Akbar Raaefi-Pour, push the idea that the narrative is that the story told in the Book of Esther is a false account of historical events. For them, the real historical story of Purim is that Mordechai manipulated the king into banishing Queen Vashti and installing Esther as part of a scheme. Haman sought to expel the Jews because they were oppressing others, but Esther and Mordechai ultimately secured royal approval for the Jews to kill 77,000 Iranians.
Some even link Purim to Sizdah Bedar, the Iranian spring picnic day, claiming that Persians commemorate the day Iranians fled their homes to escape a Jewish massacre by gathering outdoors.
A holy site turned political
Despite the efforts of Iranian Jews to demonstrate allegiance to the regime and hatred of Israel, the tomb of Esther and Mordechai has repeatedly become a stage for anti-Israel and anti-Jewish protests.
As early as 2011, demonstrators hung a banner on the fence reading “The Holocaust of 77,000 Iranians,” and burned Israeli flags. After the October 7 attacks in 2023, the mausoleum was again a magnet: protesters burned Israeli flags and waved Palestinian and Basij militia flags. During that time, calls circulated on Iranian social media to convert the tomb into a museum commemorating alleged Jewish crimes against Iranians.
In the years following, Jewish Iranians making pilgrimages to the site have been met with the sight of a Palestinian flag hanging from the entrance gate.
More recently, after an Israeli strike killed seven IRGC commanders in Damascus in 2024, a Molotov cocktail was thrown at the site.
Meanwhile, attempts to push back on the official Purim story have led to arrests of even foreign visitors, according to Gindin, who recounted that several years ago, two American Jewish tourists were detained: “They wrote graffiti in Iran that said ‘Death to Haman.”
So long as renewed military strikes don’t shut the country down, the megillah will be read in synagogues on Purim in distinctively Iranian style, with limited booing for decorum purposes. Costumes will be omitted (a custom that reflects Iran’s modesty norms), and instead of mishloach manot, some will prepare halva. Despite Iran being officially alcohol-free, Jews will be permitted to drink inside their homes for religious purposes.
But they will also continue to play a careful game, showing loyalty to the state in an attempt to secure their own safety.
The post As Iran’s Jews prepare for Purim, their government calls its story proof of a past genocide appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Interviews with Holocaust survivors reveal the richness of Yiddish
Many people today prize the Yiddish of native speakers who grew up in Eastern Europe before World War II, viewing it as a mark of linguistic authenticity.
As a language of daily life that millions of Jews spoke in a range of regional dialects, Yiddish had, over the centuries, become enriched with many words and idioms that were unique to a specific location.
More than 80 years after the end of the Holocaust, very few of those speakers are still around. As a result, the Yiddish they spoke is deemed precious. Thanks to a new online resource, in which dozens of Holocaust survivors talk about their lives before, during and after the war, anyone can now hear the language of that bygone era.
There are already a number of resources that document the Yiddish of these native speakers. Among the earliest examples are 28 audio recordings made by David Boder, a psychologist who traveled from the United States to Europe in 1946 to interview Holocaust survivors. He asked them about their wartime experiences in nine different languages, including Yiddish.
Another valuable source for hearing native Yiddish speakers is the Language and Cultural Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry (LCAAJ). In the late 1950s, linguist Uriel Weinreich launched this project, based at Columbia University, to study Yiddish dialects and folklore. Weinreich and his colleagues taped responses from over 600 European-born Yiddish speakers to a detailed survey of their language, with over 3,000 individual questions, as in, for example: “What games did you play as a child?”
One of the largest number of recordings of these Yiddish speakers can be found in the Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive (VHA), launched in 1994. Based at the University of Southern California, the VHA holds almost 50,000 video interviews with Holocaust survivors. Among these recordings, which were conducted in 32 different languages, are more than 600 entirely or partially in Yiddish. Until recently, only people who had access to the VHA, mostly through university libraries, were able to listen to this trove of Yiddish speakers as they relate their life histories. Thanks to a new online resource, known as the Corpus of Spoken Yiddish in Europe (CSYE), anyone can now hear these interviews.
The CSYE is the brainchild of Yiddish sociolinguist Isaac Bleaman who first worked with the VHA’s Yiddish interviews for his doctoral dissertation, where he compared the Yiddish spoken in the 2010s by Hasidim and Yiddishists. Through these recordings, Bleaman was able to explore how these two contemporary forms of Yiddish developed.
After joining the faculty at Berkeley, Bleaman sought a way to make the VHA’s Yiddish interviews more accessible to both linguists and students learning the language. Eventually, he received permission from the Shoah Foundation to use some 200 of its Yiddish videos for this purpose, and in 2022 he was awarded a multiyear grant from the National Science Foundation to establish the CSYE.
Creating this online resource entails manually transcribing the interviews, which are rendered both in transliteration and in the Yiddish alphabet. This is a painstaking process that relies on skilled speakers of Yiddish as well as other languages that the survivors may have included in the interviews. The transcripts, when synced with the videos, enable users of the CSYE to search the interviews for specific terms and topics.
A database on the CSYE lists each survivor’s name, city of birth, gender, age and dialect of Yiddish (Central, Northeastern, or Southeastern). The website also features an interactive map, showing the location of each survivor’s hometown, grouped by dialect. A different map shows where the VHA interviews were recorded in the 1990s. Ranging across Europe, the Americas, Australia and Israel, they reflect the scope of the postwar Yiddish-speaking diaspora.
In this Yiddish interview, for example, Holocaust survivor Lazar Milamed talks about his childhood in a Ukrainian village, his experiences under the Nazis and his post-war life in Brooklyn.
The CSYE also offers an interactive page that enables users to generate their own word maps to explore the geographic range of words or patterns of speech.
To demonstrate how the CSYE can be used for linguistic research and for language learning, the website provides instruction on pronunciation, as well as examples of the East European Yiddish dialects (for example, which of the interviewees said nit for the word “not” vs. those who said nisht). To date, 171 interviews, totaling more than 300 hours, have been transcribed. When this process is completed, the CSYE explains on its website, it will provide public access to “the most extensive source of conversational Yiddish ever compiled,” which will “bring the voices and narratives of native Yiddish speakers into the classroom.”
For the Yiddish student, teacher and researcher, or anyone else who loves the language, the CSYE is an extraordinary resource. Listening to survivors recount their life histories is compelling, both for the experiences they recall and for the cherished language in which they speak.
The post Interviews with Holocaust survivors reveal the richness of Yiddish appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Trump Says US May Strike Iran Again but That Tehran Wants Deal
People walk past a mural depicting the late leader of the Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and the late Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in Tehran, Iran. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
President Donald Trump said on Tuesday that the United States may need to strike Iran again and that he had been an hour away from ordering an attack before postponing it.
Trump made the comments a day after saying he had paused a planned resumption of hostilities following a new proposal by Tehran to end the US-Israeli war.
“I was an hour away from making the decision to go today,” Trump told reporters at the White House on Tuesday.
Iran‘s leaders are begging for a deal, he said, adding that a new US attack would happen in coming days if no agreement was reached.
The United States has been struggling to end the war it began with Israel nearly three months ago. Trump has previously said that a deal with Tehran was close, and similarly threatened heavy strikes on Iran if it did not reach an accord.
The US president is under intense political pressure at home to reach an accord that would reopen the Strait of Hormuz – a key route for global supplies of oil and other commodities. Gas prices remain high and Trump‘s approval rating has plummeted as congressional elections loom in November.
Oil prices settled lower on Tuesday after Vice President JD Vance said Washington and Tehran had made a lot of progress in talks and neither side wanted to see a resumption of the military campaign. “We’re in a pretty good spot here,” he said.
Speaking to reporters at a White House briefing, Vance acknowledged difficulties in negotiating with a fractured Iranian leadership. “It’s not sometimes totally clear what the negotiating position of the team is,” he said, so the US is trying to make its own red lines clear.
He also said one objective of Trump‘s policy is to prevent a nuclear arms race from spreading in the region.
IRAN PROMISES RESPONSE TO ANY NEW ATTACK
In Tehran, Ebrahim Azizi, head of the Iranian parliament’s national security committee, said on X that pausing an attack was due to Trump‘s realization that any move against Iran would mean “facing a decisive military response.”
Iranian state media said Tehran‘s latest peace proposal involves ending hostilities on all fronts including Lebanon, the exit of US forces from areas close to Iran, and reparations for destruction caused by the US-Israeli attacks.
Tehran also sought the lifting of sanctions, release of frozen funds, and an end to the US marine blockade, according to Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi as cited by IRNA news agency.
The terms as described in the Iranian reports appeared little changed from Iran‘s previous offer, which Trump rejected last week as “garbage.”
BOTH SIDES ‘CHANGING GOALPOSTS,’ SAYS PAKISTANI SOURCE
Reuters could not determine whether military preparations had been made for strikes that would mark a renewal of the war Trump started in late February.
Trump said on Monday that Washington would be satisfied if it could reach an agreement that prevented Tehran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.
A Pakistani source confirmed that Islamabad, which has conveyed messages between the sides since hosting the only round of peace talks last month, had shared the Iranian proposal with Washington.
The sides “keep changing their goalposts,” the Pakistani source said, adding, “We don’t have much time.”
CEASEFIRE MOSTLY HOLDING
The US-Israeli bombing killed thousands of people in Iran before it was suspended in a ceasefire in early April. Israel has killed thousands more and driven hundreds of thousands from their homes in Lebanon, which it invaded in pursuit of the Iran-backed Hezbollah terrorist group.
Iranian strikes on Israel and neighboring Gulf states have killed dozens of people.
The Iran ceasefire has mostly held, although drones have lately been launched from Iraq towards Gulf countries, including Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, apparently by Iran and its allies.
The US seized an Iran-linked oil tanker in the Indian Ocean overnight, the Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday, citing three US officials. The tanker, known as the Skywave, was sanctioned by the US in March for its role in transporting Iranian oil, the report said.
Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said they launched the war to curb Iran‘s support for regional militias, dismantle its nuclear program, destroy its missile capabilities, and create conditions for Iranians to topple their rulers.
But the war has yet to deprive Iran of its stockpile of near-weapons-grade enriched uranium or its ability to threaten neighbors with missiles, drones, and proxy militias.
The Islamic Republic’s clerical leadership, which had faced a mass uprising at the start of the year, withstood the superpower onslaught with no sign of organized opposition.
Uncategorized
Somaliland Says It Will Open an Embassy in Jerusalem, Israel to Reciprocate
Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar meets with Somaliland President Abdirahman Mohamed Abdullahi on Jan. 6, 2026. Photo: Screenshot
Somaliland, a self-declared republic in East Africa, will set up an embassy in Jerusalem soon, its ambassador said on Tuesday, after Israel became the first country to formally recognize it as an independent and sovereign state.
In turn, Israel is expected to set up an embassy in Somaliland‘s capital Hargeisa, Ambassador Mohamed Hagi said in a post on X.
Somaliland, which has claimed independence for decades but remains largely unrecognized, is situated on the southern coast of the Gulf of Aden and bordered by Djibouti to the northwest, Ethiopia to the south and west, and Somalia to the south and east. It has sought to break off from Somalia since 1991 and utilized its own passports, currency, military, and law enforcement.
Unlike most states in its region, Somaliland has relative security, regular elections, and a degree of political stability.
Last month, Israel appointed Michael Lotem as its first ambassador to Somaliland, after the two governments formally established full diplomatic relations.
Lotem, who was serving as a non-resident economic ambassador to Africa at the time of his appointment, will now shift to work as a non-resident ambassador to Somaliland. He previously served as Israel’s ambassador to Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Malawi, and Seychelles, a position he concluded in August.
Israel recognized Somaliland as an independent and sovereign state in December, a move Somalia rejected and termed a “deliberate attack” on its sovereignty.
Over the years, Somalia has rallied international actors against any country recognizing Somaliland.
The former British protectorate hopes that recognition by Israel will encourage other nations to follow suit, increasing its diplomatic heft and access to international markets.
Israel‘s Foreign Minister Gideon Saar said on Tuesday that the opening of the embassy in Jerusalem would be another significant step in strengthening relations with Somaliland. Once opened, the Somaliland embassy would be the eighth embassy in Jerusalem, he said.
Most countries maintain their embassies in Israel in Tel Aviv, although the United States moved its embassy to Jerusalem during President Donald Trump’s first administration. Fiji, Papua New Guinea, and a small number of other countries have also established embassies there.
Israel considers all of Jerusalem to be its capital. However, Palestinians seek East Jerusalem, where the holiest sites in Judaism are located, as the capital of a future state.