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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.
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Mamdani says ‘I can’t tell you I support’ Israel as a Jewish state
(JTA) — New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani said he could not endorse states that privilege one religion over another, including Israel and Saudi Arabia, during a one-on-one interview with ABC’s Jonathan Karl on Sunday.
“Democratic Socialists of America now says they no longer favor a two-state solution. “Is that the way you see it as well? Karl asked in the interview, which came days after Mamdani’s endorsed Democratic socialist candidates for Congress swept their New York Democratic primaries.
Among them, Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier campaigned on platforms that included opposition to U.S. military aid to Israel and support for Palestinian rights.
Mamdani replied to Karl: “The way I see it is equal rights for all people. And I think that that’s the truth for Israel. It’s the truth for any country in the world.”
When pressed by Karl that Israel is in fact a Jewish state and “that’s in the charter, that’s the way it is now,” Mamdani said he has consistently stated he supports “the state of Israel as a state with equal rights.”
However, he added, “I believe that any state that privileges one religion over the other is one that I can’t tell you I support, whether it be Israel or Saudi Arabia or anywhere else.”
The backlash to Mamdani’s comments was quick. In a statement Sunday, Ambassador Ofir Akunis, Consul General of Israel in New York, said, “Mamdani, we do not need your recognition of the Jewish state. If you knew a little history, instead of spending all day inciting and spreading hatred, you would know that Israel’s Declaration of Independence guaranteed full equality for all its citizens. That has been the reality since the day our state was established.”
Mark Dubowitz, CEO of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies think tank, posted on X, “Mamdani is either willfully ignorant or maliciously mendacious,” adding that “Israel has no official state religion.”
He also stated that there are multiple countries for which Islam is the state religion, with additional Muslim-majority countries declaring Islam as the state religion in their constitutions.
Karl also asked Mamdani about his broader views on Israel, which became a prominent issue during the New York Democratic primaries, particularly among candidates who support Israel and continued U.S. military aid.
Mamdani said voters made it clear that “they were tired of tens of billions of dollars being spent in our taxpayer dollars to violate international law to kill thousands of civilians.”
He added that currently “Palestine is described as if there is a ceasefire,” but more than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed during it. He said New Yorkers want to “follow international law, to believe in the humanity for all.”
Karl also pressed the mayor on the Poetica coffee shop incident in Brooklyn last week, where staff refused to take New York Democratic Rep. Dan Goldman’s money for a coffee purchase, calling him a “genocide enabler” because he supports Israel.
Mamdani said while he has “political disagreements” with Goldman (who lost his seat to Mamdani-backed Brad Lander), “I do believe that that’s a response that goes beyond that.”
And when asked about rising antisemitism in New York City, the mayor said that while Jews are a minority of the city’s population, they constitute a majority of victims of the hate crimes committed in the city. ”That’s something that’s unacceptable,” he said.
Akunis said, however, that “The surge in antisemitism across the United States, and particularly in New York, is the result of ignorance and a lack of knowledge, combined with a fundamental hatred of the Jewish people.”
He added, “I once again warn that Mamdani’s inflammatory rhetoric will end in very serious and violent acts against Jewish and Israeli communities throughout the city.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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In North Carolina, a memorial project will honor Martin Luther King and Holocaust victims
(JTA) — Two people lean down from an abstract version of a rail car. Their outstretched hands reach towards a family gathered around the car’s opening. The adults on the ground reach back, either to get help stepping into the car or to say good-bye.
That’s one side of the artist rendering of what will be a Holocaust monument. On the other side, train tracks lead to the entrance of the Nazis’ largest death camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau. A message across the top reads, “They were here. We remember.”
The sculpture by artists David Wilson and Stephen Hayes, called “In Transit: The Weight of Absence,” is emotional on its own. But what makes the project planned for Charlotte, North Carolina, especially noteworthy is what will be alongside it.
Charlotte is the planned home for what its organizers believe is the first memorial plaza in the United States to both honor Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and remember the Holocaust in the same space. The Circle of Humanity: Monuments for Unity and Remembrance in Marshall Park will feature the 8-foot bronze statue of King currently in the park plus the new Holocaust monument.
Linking the two will be paved walkways, educational reflections and digital resources on the Holocaust, the Civil Rights movement and the combined history of African Americans and Jews in the U.S. School and tour groups will take part in interactive educational experiences.
To those who might wonder why these monuments belong together, Rabbi Ya’aqov Walker points to a common inheritance. “You could just describe it plainly: white supremacy in continental Europe and white supremacy in the southeastern United States,” said Walker, who is Black and serves on the project’s education committee.
The groups also share deep resilience and desire for change, he said, which led to a significant Jewish presence in the civil rights movement in the United States 20 years after the Holocaust.
“It was very prescient in their minds, from King to any major civil rights leader who was committed to nonviolence, to study and learn what the Jewish experience was, and to build relationships with rabbis as fellow spiritual leaders,” said Walker, who co-leads the Charlotte Black/Jewish Alliance.
The new monument will replace a small one dedicated in 1979 that’s hidden in overgrown foliage. Project partners include the Charlotte Black/Jewish Alliance, Mecklenburg County, Queens University of Charlotte, the Stan Greenspon Holocaust Education Center, and the Charlotte-Mecklenburg branch of the NAACP.
After a national search for artists that yielded 57 design proposals, a review committee narrowed the choices to eight finalists. Wilson and Hayes, who are Black and live in Durham, North Carolina, were one of two teams asked to submit their concepts. Though they had never designed a sculpture based on a Jewish theme, they were compelled by its juxtaposition to the King monument, “creating a broader dialogue about injustice, courage and the consequences of hatred,” Wilson told county commissioners during a recent public meeting.
David Wilson, left, and Stephen Hayes are the designers of “In Transit: The Weight of Absence,” the winning design for the Circle of Humanity memorial in Charlotte’s Marshall Park. (Courtesy Circle of Humanity)
Their presentation moved Commissioner Leigh Altman, who is white, to reveal that her great-grandparents and many of their children were murdered in the Holocaust. About 25 to 30 Holocaust survivors live in the Charlotte area today.
“This shared partnership for me is a reminder across one of history’s worst genocides and the worst legacy of what America has done wrong, and brought it together to find a commonality, which was a failed obligation to recognize the humanity of others and to fight for it,” she said.
The second finalist team, Miriam Gusevich and Sal Pirrone from Washington, D.C., envisioned an abstract sculpture with thousands of silver circles to represent those killed by the Nazis. The proposed structure opened to a skylight in the shape of a Star of David. Members of Gusevich’s family died in the Holocaust.
“Circle of Humanity” organizers held 12 community feedback sessions, including at synagogues, a Black church and Johnson C. Smith University, a historically Black university. About 850 community members participated. More than 100 completed written surveys on their preferences. Ultimately, a majority favored the rail car image. At one session, participants audibly gasped when “In Transit” was revealed.
It’s yet to be determined which materials will be used to render the piece. Options range from cast and fabricated metal to large-scale 3-D printing. What likely won’t change is the sculpture’s bronze hue and structure.
“The skin tones can be interpreted in many ways, and it looks very similar to an auction block” used in the trafficking of enslaved people, Walker noted. He recalled that during a feedback session at a Black church, some church members teared up to see the reminder of family separation.
Urban Design Partners in collaboration with Groundworks Studio will develop the plaza, in a design called “Woven Histories.” Potential elements include a stone walkway with a plaid design. The plaid pays tribute to the dress that civil rights pioneer Dorothy Counts-Scoggins wore on the day in 1957 when she faced down an angry white mob to become the first Black student to attend a segregated high school in Charlotte.
The plaza will include benches and may incorporate decorative stone books. Like the monument design, the concept is still open to changes based on additional community feedback. The planned budget is just under $1 million, including a $100,000 endowment for programming and maintenance. If fundraising efforts are successful and the timeline stays on track, the plaza is scheduled to open in May 2027.
Marshall Park has particular resonance as the setting. It is part of the former Brooklyn, a Black neighborhood razed in the 1960s in the name of urban renewal. More recently, Marshall Park has been a familiar site for protests and political demonstrations.
The idea for the innovative combination began with a discussion between Rev. Corine Mack, president of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg NACCP, and Rabbi Judy Schindler, Sklut professor of Jewish studies at Queens University of Charlotte and executive director of Spill the Honey, a national non-profit which produces arts and educational materials intended to empower the Black-Jewish alliance to combat racism and antisemitism.
The Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. memorial statue in Charlotte’s Marshall Park, created by renowned sculptor Selma Burke, was dedicated on April 5, 1980. (Courtesy Arrowmount School of Arts and Crafts)
“It all came out of the same conversation, looking at the Civil Rights movement, looking at the rise in racial slurs and antisemitism, and just really understanding that we have to do something to elevate the importance of not only our cultures, but what love would look like in this country,” Mack said. “I thought it was important that we went back to the root of the civil rights movement, which was us collaborating.”
She acknowledges a few phone calls from members of Charlotte’s Black community who expressed concern about the collaboration in light of the war and political divides opened after the Hamas attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Others were unclear about the benefits of bringing the two histories together. But no vocal opposition has emerged to the project. Organizers say on-site education about the history of Black-Jewish ties in America is essential.
Charlotte has its own claims to this history. Humorist and social critic Harry Golden lived in the city and published his commentaries in The Carolina Israelite, a newspaper whose subscribers included Congressional members and well-known writers. In “The Vertical Negro Plan” in 1956, he pointedly noted that whites seemed to have no trouble standing next to Black Americans. It was only when Black people wanted to sit “that the fur begins to fly.” His tongue-in-cheek solution? Remove the seats at schools and lunch counters.
In 1971, attorney Adam Stein, father of N.C. Gov. Josh Stein, was part of the legal team who argued Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education before the Supreme Court. The case began the era of busing for school integration nationwide. Busing for that purpose officially ended in Charlotte in 2002, when the Supreme Court declined to take up a challenge to lower-court ruling recognizing local schools as adequately desegregated .
Now, supporters hope the Circle of Humanity will be a catalyst for Black-Jewish collaborations in other cities. Schindler, named after a great-aunt who was killed during the Holocaust, wants the gathering spot to be a place not only for remembrance, but for inspiration and beginnings.
“It’s really important to me that we bring joy to this work,” she said, envisioning the opening ceremony filled with klezmer music as well as both soul food and Jewish noshes. She cautions against “letting those to seek to harm us control our thoughts and our struggles and our fears. We need to celebrate our culture and who we are with pride and joy, so I pray that this will be a centerpiece for cultural celebration of all sorts.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post In North Carolina, a memorial project will honor Martin Luther King and Holocaust victims appeared first on The Forward.
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Tennessee GOP leaders denounce ‘No wars for Jews’ mailers bearing Young Republicans name
(JTA) — A rural Tennessee region was rocked this week after thousands of homes received mailers encouraging them to join the local Young Republicans chapter with a campaign platform including “No wars for Jews.”
The flyers led to a dramatic showdown at a local GOP meeting, including a state lawmaker’s cry of “I am a Jew!” and a rejoinder from Austin Lee, the young man behind the flyers: “We will not fight wars for you.” Cops escorted the provocateur out.
“Let’s face it, we read about antisemitism and anti-Black or white nationalism, right?” the lawmaker, State Rep. Scott Cepicky, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “We hear about this stuff, and people are like, ‘Well, you know, that’s over there, or that’s in another state, that’s not here.’ Let me tell you something. It came to Maury County.”
The mailers, which encouraged recipients to “support” Lee, also said “Stop the Great Replacement” (a reference to the antisemitic Great Replacement Theory), “Ban Islam and Hinduism” and “Men in charge.”
“Nonwhite foreigners have invaded our country and are replacing White Americans,” read the flyers, viewed by JTA and reportedly sent to around 2,000 households with young white men. “Efforts at mass deportations have failed. No one is coming to save us; we must solve this problem ourselves.”
The flyers were mailed mainly in Maury County, 50 miles south of Nashville, as well as some surrounding counties. In addition to Lee’s name and an invitation to join the Maury County Young Republicans, they contained the prominent logo of the Tennessee Young Republicans — invoking broader concerns that a younger generation of Republicans are trending toward antisemitic and white nationalist ideas.
However, local Republican leaders told JTA the mailers were sent out without permission; that Lee holds no formal leadership role in the county GOP; and that the county’s Young Republicans chapter is currently inactive.
The county GOP chair strongly denounced the content of the mailers to JTA.
“It’s appalling that somebody would send this out,” Jason Gilliam told JTA about his reaction to the flyers. “This kind of thing really disgusts me. I mean, I have an Israeli flag on my bumper — not that that means anything.”
Gilliam said he first became aware of the flyers on Sunday, after households had begun receiving them. At a local GOP meeting the next day, Cepicky condemned the flyers by invoking his own Jewish ancestry.
“I’m a Jew, I’m an Ashkenazi Jew,” Cepicky told the crowd at the GOP meeting in a video taken and later posted by Lee himself. “My family left Israel, moved to Central Europe. In the 30s, you know what happened in Central Europe with Jews. My family immigrated to the United States.”
After Cepicky threatened to “pursue the law on these individuals” who distributed the mailer, Lee, who was also in attendance at the meeting, identified himself.
Cepicky accused Lee of spreading rhetoric “espoused in Europe” in the 1930s. Lee responded, “It was right then, and it is right now. We will not fight wars for you.” Lee was later escorted from the event by law enforcement. Lee has on social media cited Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a “war for Jews.”
Cepicky told JTA he felt compelled to denounce Lee’s antisemitism in part because he was standing in front of a replica of the preamble to the U.S. Constitution at the meeting.
“It was behind me, and it spurred me to say, ‘That doesn’t say, “We the Christians,” or, “We the Jews,” or, “We the Islamics,” or, “We the men, we the women.” It doesn’t say that,’” he said. “It says, ‘We the people.’”
Cepicky told JTA that he is a practicing Christian who discovered his Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry on 23andMe. He said his family arrived sometime after the 1917 Russian Revolution. He made his first trip to Israel in 2024, to visit the kibbutzim attacked by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, and helped found the Tennessee Israel Caucus in the state legislature shortly thereafter.
Gilliam and Cepicky both described Lee to JTA as an infrequent attendee at county GOP meetings who holds no leadership role with the party, and said the county Young Republicans chapter was inactive. They added they would be pushing for an investigation into what they said was his unauthorized use of the county and state Young Republicans name on his mailers.
In social media posts and other interviews following the meeting, Lee continued to assert that he was the president of Maury County Young Republicans. He also referred to Cepicky multiple times as “Jewish Representative Scott Cepicky.”
“I took over that chapter,” Lee said in an interview Wednesday with a local radio station, claiming he had used a “process” to reactivate the local Young Republicans group. He declined to answer questions about who funded his mailers.
In a statement to media, the statewide Tennessee Young Republicans said the use of their logo “was not authorized” and said the group “did not, and does not, authorize, endorse, or support the recent communications published by the Maury County Young Republicans.”
As of press time, the Tennessee Young Republicans list Maury County as an active chapter on their website. Efforts by JTA to contact the group’s statewide director were unsuccessful. In recent months, official Young Republicans chapters across the country have become embroiled in antisemitism controversies.
Whether Lee has any more solid connection with local GOP officials was a matter of dispute. Gilliam claimed he had first been introduced to Lee by Aaron Miller, a local elected GOP county commissioner with whom Gilliam has since had a falling-out over unrelated matters. Asked about his relationship to Miller on the radio, Lee declined to comment.
Reached by JTA on Friday, Miller denied he had any connection to Lee beyond that “we had beers a couple of times.”
“I don’t agree with his politics. I don’t agree with his approach,” Miller told JTA. “I got a mailer and I was like, ‘Oh, OK, this is interesting.’”
Lee did not respond to a JTA request for comment.
Miller did say that young men, feeling unrepresented by the current Republican Party, are seeking out “alternatives to liberal democracy.” He has advocated for the county GOP to reach out more to the population, he said.
“Anything where you’re going to approach an entire group of people with a blanket mindset, I think that’s wicked,” he said. “We’re all made in God’s image.”
Gilliam and Cepicky told JTA that, in addition to the antisemitism, they strongly objected to the mailers’ anti-immigrant rhetoric and misogyny. At a time of Republican-led immigration crackdowns on the national level, and as national figures including Vice President JD Vance have downplayed the rise of antisemitism within the party, these local GOP leaders loudly insisted such forces should be stamped out.
“This kind of stuff is absolutely not going to be allowed. I will not stand for it,” Gilliam said. “If you don’t cut the head off the snake, it’s going to come back, right? It’s not going to stop. It’s only going to fester. It’s going to grow. And this kind of thing, the roots need to be yanked out of the ground.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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