Mid June, while Israeli air strikes focused on Iranian military bases, senior Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commanders and nuclear facilities, the Islamic Republic shifted its battlefield to a new front: the air waves.
A hair-raising propaganda campaign was broadcast on the state run by the state. Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamei seemed flanked by revolutionary guards officers while a storyteller declared, “We are all proud soldiers … We will uproot the Jews with our strength.”
The message was clear, the projecting of challenges after the military and nuclear device of the regime got a humiliating blow from Israel, while also bore an ominous signal to the Jewish population of Iran.
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Iranian Jewish men reveal their much decorated holy role of room Aron Kodesh, as part of their daily prayer in a synagogue in Tehran, Iran, on February 13, 2020. (Hossein Beris/Midden -Sost images/AFP via Getty images)
In the days after the 12-day war, regime troops launched a wave of arrests. Hundreds of Iranians were held for spy costs, including at least 35 Jews in Tehran and Shiraz. Many were interviewed and harassed. Allegedly their activity was examined on social media and they were put under pressure to break the contact with family members abroad, in particular those in Israel.
This was not only a performance, but a calculated step to insulate and intimidate an already vulnerable community.
Jews have lived in Iran for almost 3000 years. Their roots before Islam and Christianity. Formed by the legacy of Queen Esther, whose story is told every year during Purim, the Jews of Iran did not survive persecution, war and revolution by confrontation, but by careful adjustment and, often, silence.
The Jews of Iran are regularly used as pawns by the regime to venture the anti-Israeli sentiment, as could be seen on October 30, 2023, when reports showed that the Iranian authorities forced “Iranian Jewish leaders and their communities” to get rid of five steads over five towns over five towns over five towns over five towns over stateds over five towns over stateds over stateds over five towns over steads over steads over steads over five towns over stateds over stateds over five towns over stateds over five towns over stateds over five towns over steads over five towns over steads over five towns over steads over five towns over steads over steads over five towns over steads. Cities over five cities over five cities over five cities over five cities in October.
Nowadays there are around 10,000 Jews in Iran, who form the largest Jewish population in the middle -east outside of Israel. In the constitution of Iran they are recognized as a ‘people of the book’ and are allowed to pray in synagogues and run restaurants, butchers and schools – all under the watchful eye of the regime. This limited freedom does not come from religious tolerance, but because it has served a strategic goal and helps the regime declare accusations of anti -Semitism.
Rescuers work on the scene of an explosion after an Israeli strike in Tehran, Iran, on Friday 13 June 2025. (Iranian Red Crescent Society via AP)
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The same political calculus explains why the parliament of Iran or Majles“ Reserves one seat for a Jewish representative and why Jewish representatives occasionally joined the delegation of the Islamic Republic in the highest week of the United Nations General Meeting that are held in New York every year in September.
As the Iranian American writer Roya Hakakian states in the Atlantic Ocean: “The existence of Jewish Iranians in the country became an important symbol [to the mullahs]Especially in contrast to the absence of Jewish life in other Muslim countries in the region … The Jews of Iran became the regime main defense against accusations of anti -Semitism, while some leaders questioned the truth of the Holocaust notorously. ”
Indeed, in 2005 the then President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad organized an international Holocaust cartoon competition-a grotesque representation of Jewish and Holocaust-Ontgnitation that continues today with the support of the state.
Since the Islamic Revolution of 1979, when a theocratic, anti-American and anti-Israeli regime seized power, the Jewish population of Iran has fallen by 90% of around 100,000 under the last monarch of the country, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The shocking execution of Habib Elghanian, a Jewish Iranian businessman, philanthropist and community leader, accelerated the Exodus in 1979.
Iranians burn an Israeli flag during a rally marked day and the funeral of members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps who were killed in a suspected Israeli air attack on the Iranian ambassador complex in the Syrian capital, Damascus, in Tehran, on April 5, 204. (Majid Asgaripour/Wana (West Asia News Agency) via Reuters)
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But unlike other Jewish communities in the middle, the Jews of Iran were never forced en masse. Their presence has been continuous, but their safety has always been vulnerable.
The recent arrests of Jews in Iran are only the last reminder that the Islamic Republic of loyalty to the regime considered absolutely – and any observed deviation, whether it is by protest or even have a relative abroad, can be seen as a threat. The same regime that censors journalists, artists and musicians prison and schoolgirls punishes for the removal of their hijab now focuses on Jews for having family ties abroad.
This is one of the central themes of my upcoming book, Unveiled: Inside Iran’s #womanlifefreedom Revolt, which is investigating how the uprising of 2022-2023 was fueled by the death of Mahsa Amini, revealed a growing gap between the Iranian people and the regime. The enemy of the Islamic Republic is not only Zionism or the West – it is autonomy and different opinion.
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The Jews of Iran are again imprisoned in a geopolitical storm. Their silence is not complicity, but survival. And their endurance is not a reflection of the tolerance of the regime, but of the resilience of the Jewish people.
They should not be forgotten by global Judaism, nor by those who still believe in a future for Iran who is free and just.
