Persia

I am as Askenazi as they come.

When I was a child, a neighbor told my mother that I resembled Shirley Temple.

“Vere ist Shirley Temple?” my Romanian-born Yiddish speaking mother asked.

Life in my hometown, Borough Park, Brooklyn was very insular. Everyone was a “berg, stein, thal or witz”. When a few Yemini Jews moved in I was amazed. Where was Yemen?

I never met a Syrian Jew. I later learned that there was a large Syrian neighborhood about three miles away but they might as well have been in another state.

Persian Jews?

Persia still had Jews?

Fast forward to 1979 and the rise of Ayatollah Khomeini and his tyrannical rule. A flood of Persian Jews fled Iran, many to New York and Los Angeles.

Today, Iran is at war and its people are fighting to overthrow the despots.

Thousands of civilians have been killed. Thousands more are being held in prisons threatened with execution.

There is a Jewish custom of renaming a sick person in the hope that the Angel of Death will not recognize him and pass by.

Once the Islamic Republic of Iran tyrants are defeated, Iran should reclaim Persia as its sole legal and cultural name.

Perhaps the Evil One will be assuaged.

The Jewish people, chased from land to land, persecuted, killed, for millennia, understand such things.

We rebuilt our communities, relocated if necessary until finally re-establishing the modern state of Israel.

Persians will do the same.

Israel is offering assistance in ways known and unknown and points with gratitude to Cyrus the Great who ended the Babylonian bondage and enabled Jews to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the Second Temple.

Alliance is our mutual heritage.

And we, living in the Diaspora can be insular no more.