Jewish community shrank from over 100,000 before the 1979 revolution
Each week, Chief Rabbi Yehuda Gerami leads worshipers at his recently renovated Abrishami Synagogue, part of a compound in the heart of Tehran that includes Jewish schools, a kosher restaurant and traditional baths. Abrishami is one of about 60 active synagogues in Iran for which Gerami serves as chief rabbi, a role he has held since 2011. A U.S. citizen born in Tehran seven years after the Islamic Revolution, he lived and conducted religious studies in Jerusalem and Baltimore.
“Whatever the Jewish community needs, it exists in Iran,” Gerami said, citing a yeshiva—a traditional Jewish center of study—and 24 ritual baths around the country. What Iranian Jews do not have, according to The Wall Street Journal, is a political voice.
The community lives in constant tension between its Jewish identity and the demands of the Islamic Republic, seeking to pursue religious beliefs without being seen as challenging the government. Maintaining Jewish life entails an unstated bargain with Iran’s leadership, according to the Journal: as long as the community avoids politics, stays loyal to Iran and keeps away from Israel, it can follow its traditions.
“I’m not a politician,” Gerami said on his first trip outside Iran since Israel and the United States launched attacks in February. “What interests me is Jewish life, not politics.”
The community has shrunk from more than 100,000 before the Islamic Revolution in 1979. Gerami estimates that about 20,000 Jews remain in Iran, although others think the number is many fewer. Iranian Jews are forbidden from contact with relatives and friends in Israel and cannot visit the country, home to Judaism’s holiest sites; contact with Jews in the United States beyond family and close friends is frequently difficult. The restrictions “put people under stress,” Gerami said, but the community can overcome them.
The war between Iran and the forces of the United States and Israel “has a negative effect on us and we don’t like it,” Gerami said. The conflict has complicated life for Iran’s Jews, he said, just as it has for Jews worldwide. “Interestingly, in Iran we’ve always lived in peace with the Muslims,” he said, and Iran’s synagogues don’t require security as they do in many other countries.
The past year has produced renewed difficulty, according to Sam Kermanian, a senior adviser to the U.S.-based Federation of Iranian Jews, starting when Israel and the United States attacked Iran last June and again during the war since February. Kermanian said authorities last year detained 35 Jews and questioned them over ties to Israel after Mossad infiltrated teams during the June 2025 airstrikes; all were eventually released.
Contact with the community in recent months has become very limited, Kermanian said, with Iranian Jews needing to be careful about conveying even the most trivial information to the outside world. “Even today, this is a community that is essentially defenseless and at the mercy of the government,” he said. “Clearly, the issue of confrontations with Israel and Iran’s policies toward Israel is something that could at any moment affect the Jewish community.”
Kermanian said the federation has documented 17 executions of Jews since 1979 and a dozen disappearances, mainly in the early years of the government. He estimated arrests at around 2,000, many of them for reasons that weren’t explicitly political. In 1999, authorities detained 13 Iranian Jews on charges of spying for Israel, quickly convicted 10 of them and later released them under international pressure.
The community’s position changed abruptly with the 1979 revolution that toppled the Shah and brought Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to power. Many Iranian Jews panicked after the new leaders arrested and executed Habib Elghanian, one of the country’s most prominent businessmen, on charges of Zionist espionage—one of hundreds of executions of people close to the Shah’s government that year. Khomeini cut ties with Israel, labeling it “Little Satan” alongside “the Great Satan,” America, and gave Israel’s former embassy—a short walk from Gerami’s Abrishami Synagogue—to the Palestine Liberation Organization.
Meir Javedanfar, who grew up in Iran and now teaches Iranian politics at Reichman University in Israel, recalled the sudden change. “Suddenly, from good relations with Israel and regular flights to Tel Aviv, you saw Yasser Arafat being welcomed as the first guest after the revolution,” he said, referring to the late PLO leader.
Roya Hakakian, a Jewish Iranian-American, described growing discrimination and some intimidation of Jews and other minorities after the revolution. Some shops were forced to display signs that their owners weren’t Muslim. The government maintained hostility through the 1980s, Hakakian said: “They would create obstacles—annoyances for all the minority groups—treating them as second-class citizens.”
Conditions improved in the 1990s as Iran opened up and new leaders emerged. The government, while anti-Israel, said the domestic Jewish community showed Iran wasn’t antisemitic. Iranian presidents, traveling annually to the United Nations General Assembly in New York, sometimes brought the country’s sole Jewish lawmaker to support government claims of tolerance, the Journal reported. The remaining community has gradually grown more Orthodox, say people familiar with it, which some say has won it a degree of respect from Iran’s leadership; Gerami’s synagogue renovated its facilities over recent years.
Gerami’s willingness to avoid geopolitics in a country whose international policies target Jews as well as Israel and its allies has prompted accusations that he is an apologist for the Iranian government. “Yes, sometimes I read that people say that about me, but my goal is not what other people say,” he said.