Ashkefardim: No Ruz, Nissan, Together, Still

Our synagogue hosted its first-ever No Ruz celebration last week. An extraordinary evening of live piano performances and dancing by youth and readings of Hafez poetry.

I felt it  resonant on many levels for me as an individual, for my family, and for the large gathering in our sanctuary as a kehilah kedoshah, a sacred community.

Gratitude to the amazing lay leaders (who are among some of my dearest friends) for bringing this night to fruition, and our Rabbi and Hazzan for sanctifying the integration of Persian Judaism and wholeness to our congregation. It was cause for a Shehechiayanoo, a time to pause and reflect with gratitude for our time in 2025: There is literally no place else where this could have taken place! Girls dancing, youth of two genders playing difficult classical Farsi piano compositions, women reciting Hafez, together, in a synagogue. In Iran we’d be arrested, maybe killed.
Although I had personally been in attendance and involved in planning No Ruz events with other organizations many times in previous years, this year felt especially poignant.

Exactly one year ago, I had just returned from a life-altering Solidarity Mission to Israel. Ours had been an intrepid group: 19 Persian Jewish women, one Persian man, and one Ashkenazi woman. I was the only one of three American-born in the group. I have not been to Iran yet.

Given my families of origin, I am more steeped in Persian culture, Judaism, and Israel than a full tin of loose leaves of aromatic cardamom earl grey and jasmine teas: I am a co-founder of a Persian Culture Committee, officer of a  Sephardic Heritage Alliance, a former officer of my synagogue, involved in local civic organizations, and schools and have been to Israel many times before, including for life cycle events, BH.

Our synagogue community had begun as Ashkenazi. It is slowly adapting to Ashkefardi, a mashup of both, ceding the Ashkenormative presumptions of the years when I had served as the first Persian Jewish female officer over a decade ago.

Back then, when I addressed the congregation in English, I was sometimes accusedn-to my face!-  of speaking in dog whistles, as though I had spoken in Farsi. As though I were inviting only Persians, or excluding Ashkenazim, or vice versa. Merely for speaking, for being.

For many years, raising my now-grown children, we stretched and tried mightily to be in both worlds for their sake. We learned both Ashkenazi trop and Sephardi trop. We learned piyyutim and brought prayer leaders,  such as Maureen Nehedar, Yahalah Lakmish and Farid Dardashti to enhance the tefillah at Selihot. The congregation stretched, too, as a kehillah kedoshah.

Along with friends, over the years, we arranged for the public library and parks to host author events, art exhibits, movie nights, concerts, and Persian cultural events, such as for No Ruz in order that our community could have positive ways to acculturate.

Accretively, it has finally become normal for the clergy to say “sal” along with the Yiddish complement, “yahrzeit.” It has finally became normal for the luncheon served at synagogue kiddush to include both both brown boiled eggs and white boiled eggs, (which taste almost identical). It is finally normal to have tea served next to the coffee. It is normal for brides and grooms to celebrate aufruf before their weddings and Shabbat Aroosee after. They all get blessings, all have Kiddushin,  and candies thrown their way. Some even receive loud ululations, “kee-lee-lee-lee”  as Jacob and Rachel did in the Torah.

The Torah scrolls in the tik are no longer referred to as “Sephardic Torahs” because a Torah is a Torah whether on Etzei Chayim wooden handles  or in a vertical case, just as a Jew is a Jew whether their family originally came from Europe, the Middle East, South America, South Africa or converted.

Still, last March 2024, in Israel, the Solidarity Mission was broader than my synagogue community.  It included women and a man from across the region with a broad pluralistic range of experiences and expectations.  We rode around a ravaged Israel together by bus just six months after October 7, 2023. We were each raw, and Israel all the more so.

It was the cusp of spring, with Purim and No Ruz approaching. Yet, it was not a festive time. Somehow, though, as we visited wounded IDF soldiers and cleaned out gutted bomb shelters we each began to find our voices, together. We began to sing a trendy, newly released version of the Hebrew anthem, “Am Yisrael Chai.” The Jewish People Live.  We, also, found our voices in anger and anguish. All over Israel, which is a multicultural, multiethnic, indigeneous land which is the seat of all the world’s monotheistic religions, in the background, over the hills, as well as  in the din of cities, are the constant,  plaintive sounds of the Muezzin, the Muslim call to prayer.

For those who have never been or heard, the sound of the Muezzin, is almost indistinguishable from the Mizrahi Middle Eastern Jews’ chanting style of prayer. The dissonance of looking and hearing alike is both uncanny and unnerving at once:
We Jews of Middle Eastern descent do, after all, come from the same part of the world as the those from Iran who seek to annihilate all of the Western World- -Haman, Amalek, Hamas. It is a lived experience which is, literally, too close for comfort. The women around me, just as my husband, grew up hearing “Marg Bar Amrika” Death to America and “Marg Bar Israel” Death to Israel” every day in school. When I had been bullied, by Jews and non Jews, for being the only Persian Jew in my entire school as a child in Queens, New York during the Iran Hostage crisis in 1979, they had been kids forced into exile after the Iranian Revolution.

One day, after planting trees on a hill overlooking the Negev, reciting Hebrew blessings, and hearing the call of the muezzin in the distance, we boarded the bus. We were in our own thoughts.  No Ruz was approaching along with the end of the trip. There was so much emotion. Some were insisting that they never wanted to hear another word of Farsi, set or see a haft seen or be reminded of Iran ever again. Who could blame anyone?

The trauma and anger of Iran’s mullah government’s  villainous support of Hamas terrorists was bloodcurdling. Mixed in with the traumas of the forced exile from Iran in 1979.  Vile.

Add to the pen-up fury and betrayal of women of Iran slain in the streets for defying hejab in “Zan Zendegee Azadee” Women, Life, Freedom protests. Juxtaposed against the violation of Israeli women, raped as war crime. It was truly excruciating and unbearable.   It felt as women will have never have peace. We had loud and, also, intimate, discussions about this.

When we came home, I hosted a Purim Seudah to mark the return from Israel. I invited all to say a Gomel blessing together, and offered this talk about our Mission. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1XRjQ9ukxxQYxQULcpV85KtCS2egz_hcp/view?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR3L3AtCfinS6GcGmNdm5jSHVRNvPartzg9Me1Q4ipTkP6ABS5MgQfKBVJc_aem_0b4ioLrfTjoVdc5ECS28vgIt is exactly a year later now. Many of the hostages snatched by Hamas terrorists are not-yet released. Israel is still at war. Again. The United States is in political flux, too.

Though I have never been to Iran, and may never go, I leaned in, again to Persian culture this year. I set a haft seen at home. The haft seen are seven symbols of spring which begin with an s sound, and are aspirations for the coming year: health, wisdom, prosperity, strength, fertility.  I, also,  set a haft seen in a school. I read a book about a Persian father to schoolchildren. I made Kashan’s Persian halva for Purim with my family. I delivered halva as shalah manot, as we have for years, BH.

I consciously decided this would not be the year to abandon my forbears’ heritage, but rather, to  amplify it. Knowing what they went through to preserve our Persian culture and the Jews’ religion as a minority,  inspires me to ensure our freedoms and civil rights  both in America and in Israel: It was not lost on me all year that our children testified before Congress, rallied on campuses, led Hillels and Jewish Student Unions. It is we who provide them that fortitude to face down the creeping normalization of antisemitism and betrayal.  So, when our synagogue hosted its first NoRuz I thought it somehow cathartic that the turnout was so robust that congregants were even turned away.

I find relief and hope that some of the seeds planted are of hope for the next generation when programs like this, and others, begin to model pride in our beautiful heritage. Children are learning to be proud, to  try to integrate their Persian, Jewish, and American identities in seamless and positive ways. I believe this integration to be wholesome. I certainly wish I could have had it when I was small. It would have spared me and others  a lot of pain. My parents and grandparents  instilled love of Persian culture and Judaism at home, counterculturally. Revolutions, hostages, wars and intergenerational trauma are big things for little bodies and individual families to have to take on by themselves, in isolation.

After three millennia, it seems to me that our values,  cultures, music,  poetry are too precious, too exquisite to abandon cavalierly.  Hafez wrote in the poem I recited at our synaogoue event “Yousef Gomgashteh,” the Lost Joseph, about the Torah’s Patriarch, Joseph. Joseph was sold into slavery by his own brothers, to become a hostage. He is saved to become a vizier in Egypt, who goes on to save his people, just as Esther from the Purim Megillah does. I am told that every child in Iran memorized this Hafez poem. To be clear, Hafez was no Jew.

Yet,  Hafez reassures, Yousef,  Joseph,  “do not grieve.”

In times of despair, at least, culture continues to offer hope for hope.