Iranian Jews in Israel and USA and the Latest On Their Genes

 Nadene Goldfoot                                           

Israel                                              

In 2015, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu came to Washington, D.C., just weeks before his country held its elections, in an attempt to stop the nuclear agreement. In a speech to the United States Congress, he warned: “Today the Jewish people face another attempt by yet another Persian potentate to destroy us. Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei spews the oldest hatred, the oldest hatred of anti-Semitism with the newest technology. He tweets that Israel must be annihilated – he tweets. You know, in Iran, there isn't exactly free Internet. But he tweets in English that Israel must be destroyed.”                                                           

"Iranian Jews in Israel refers to the community of Iranian Jews who immigrated to Ottoman Palestine, Mandate Palestine, and later the State of Israel. Iranian Jews in Israel number over 135,000 and most of them are Israeli born.  

                                                                                     

Shiraz  must have had a good-sized Jewish population.  Its 1st Jewish town dates to an early, but unspecified period.  Benjamin of Tudela around 1170 found 10,000 Jew here.  Their number dwindled considerably in consequence of the persecutions suffered by Persian Jewry in general from the 15th century on  in the hands of the Moslems.  Many were forced to accept Islam, and in 1850, only 500 Jews were left.  In 1990, the Jewish population was 3,000.  

The first Persian Jews to settle in Palestine were from Shiraz. They left in 1815 in a caravan, making their way to the port of Bushehr and from there boarded a ship to Basra in southern Iraq. From there, they traveled by land to Baghdad and Damascus. Those who survived the difficult journey settled in Tzfat and Jerusalem, establishing the nucleus of the Iranian Jewish community in these cities".                                             

           Families of the missing Iranian Jews meet with David Meidan on March 20, 2014. (photo credit: Courtesy)  Two decades of mystery surrounding the fate of eight Iranian Jews who disappeared in 1994 came to a bitter close Thursday, as the Mossad said that the group had been murdered while attempting to emigrate to Israel.   The eight killed Jews were Babak Shaoulian-Tehrani, 17 at the time of his disappearance, of Tehran; Shahin Nik-Khoo, 19, of Tehran; Salari Behzad, 21, of Kermanshah; Farad Ezati-Mahmoudi, 22, of Kermanshah; Homayoun Bala-Zade, 41, of Shiraz; Omid Solouki, 17, of Tehran; Rubin Kohan-Mosleh, 17, of Shiraz; and Ibrahim Kohan-Mosleh, 16, of Shiraz.

The three whose fates remain unknown are Syrous Ghahremani, 42 or 32 at time of disappearance, of Kermanshah; Ibrahim Ghahremani, 61, of Kermanshah; and Nourollah Rabi-Zade, 52, of Shiraz. 

   The largest group of Persian Jews is found in Israel. As of 2007, Israel is home to just over 47,000 Iranian-born Jews and roughly 87,000 Israeli-born Jews with fathers born in Iran. While these numbers add up to about 135,000, when Israelis with more distant or solely maternal Iranian roots are included,  the total number of Persian Jews in Israel is estimated to be between 200,000-250,000.

A June 2009 Los Angeles Times blog article about Iranian-Israeli Jews showing solidarity with the Iranian protestors said, "The Israeli community of Iranian Jews numbers about 170,000 – including the first generation of Israeli-born – and is deeply proud of its roots." The largest concentration of Persian Jews in Israel is found in the city Holon. In Israel, Persian Jews are classified as Mizrahim.  Some list it under the Sephardim.  People of the Middle East are listed as Mizrahim, the name of Egypt in Hebrew.  

Both former President Moshe Katsav and former Minister of Defense and former head of the opposition in the Knesset Shaul Mofaz are of Persian Jewish origin. Katsav was born in Yazd and Mofaz was born in Tehran.

                                                         

             Shaul Mofaz, Iranian-born in Tehran, Iran on November 4, 1948

Shaul Mofaz (Hebrew: שאול מופז‎‎; 4 November 1948) is an Israeli former soldier and politician. He joined the Israel Defense Forces in 1966 and served in the Paratroopers Brigade. He fought in the Six-Day War, Yom Kippur War, 1982 Lebanon War, and Operation Entebbe with the paratroopers and Sayeret Matkal, an elite special forces unit. In 1998 he became the sixteenth IDF's Chief of the General Staff, serving until 2002. He is of Iranian Jewish ancestry.

After leaving the army, he entered politics. He was appointed Minister of Defense in 2002, holding the position until 2006 when he was elected to the Knesset on the Kadima list. He then served as Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Transportation and Road Safety until 2009. After becoming Kadima leader in March 2012 he became Leader of the Opposition, before returning to the cabinet during a 70-day spell in which he served as Acting Prime Minister, Vice Prime Minister and Minister without Portfolio. Kadima was reduced to just two seats in the 2013 elections, and Mofaz retired from politics shortly before the 2015 elections.

Since at least the 1980s, Persian Jews in Israel have traditionally tended to vote Likud which was what Netanyahu ran under.                                         

The United States

Earlier this year, in partnership with the Y&S Nazarian Family Foundation, the Federation launched the Y&S Nazarian Iranian Young Leadership Initiative to engage more Persian Jewish young adults in the work of the Federation and the greater Jewish community. I am proud to be part of the thriving community of 50,000+ Iranian Jews in Los Angeles and to lead this important initiative.By Guest Blogger Donna Maher, Federation’s Assistant Director, Y&S Nazarian Family Foundation Iranian Community Outreach

During the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the years that followed, two-thirds of Iran’s Jewish community of approximately 80,000 fled what had become an Islamic theocracy. They escaped en masse to Los Angeles, Washington, D.C. and the tristate area, as well as to Italy, explained Daniel Tsadik, assistant professor of Sephardic and Iranian studies at Yeshiva University.

The United States is home to 60,000–80,000 Iranian Jews, most of whom have settled in the Greater Los Angeles area, in Great Neck, New York and Baltimore, Maryland. Those in metropolitan Los Angeles have settled mostly in the affluent Westside cities of Beverly Hills and Santa Monica and the Los Angeles Westside neighborhoods of Brentwood, Westwood, and West L.A., as well as the San Fernando Valley communities of Tarzana and Encino.

Beverly Hills                                                      

 Jimmy Delshad, born  March 22, 1940  in Shiraz, Imperial State of Iran;  age 81)

Jamshid "Jimmy" Delshad (Persian: جمشید دلشاد‎) is an Iranian-American politician in the state of California. He became Mayor of Beverly Hills on March 21, 2007 when he was sworn in by Fred Hayman, and again on March 16, 2010. He is the first Iranian-American to hold public office in Beverly Hills.  Delshad left Shiraz, Iran in 1959 and came to the United States with his brothers. He studied at the University of Minnesota and received his bachelor's degree from California State University, Northridge. He started a technology company in 1978.  In 1990 he became the first Persian Jew to be elected as president of Sinai Temple, Los Angeles' oldest and largest Conservative congregation.

The Los Angeles area remains the largest hub for Iranian Jewry, even boasting a Persian Jewish mayor of Beverly Hills, Jimmy Delshad. But Iranian Jews are also a strong presence in the Great Neck municipality, comprising 30 percent of Kings Point and 21 percent of Great Neck proper, according to surveys.  “I like to call Great Neck the Jerusalem of the Persians," said Ellie Cohanim, who was born in Iran but came to America as a young child during the Revolution. “You’re talking about a group that’s been here only for 30 years and yet we’ve accomplished so much,” said Cohanim, director of Institutional Advancement at Yeshiva University’s Stern College for Women, who is highly involved in Great Neck’s Persian community.                         

                              Rodeo Drive Street in Beverly Hills, CA

In particular, Persian Jews make up a sizeable proportion of the population of Beverly Hills, California. Persian Jews constitute a great percentage of the 26% of the total population of Beverly Hills that identifies as Iranian-American. 

Following the 1979 Iranian Revolution, tens of thousands of Persian Jews migrated from Iran, forming one of the wealthiest waves of immigrants to ever come to the United States. The community is credited with revitalizing Beverly Hills and re-developing its architecture, and for the development of ornate mansions across the city.                                                    

Mayor Delshad with the Queen of Iran-Queen PAHLAVİ, when her husband was the Shah of Iran who liked Israel and the USA, November 17, 2004.  That looks like Doris Day on his left with the blonde hair.  

According to the US Census Bureau's 2010 American Community Survey, 26% of Beverly Hills' 34,000 residents are of Iranian origin. On March 21, 2007, Jimmy Delshad, a Persian Jew who immigrated to the United States in 1958, became the Mayor of Beverly Hills. This election made Delshad one of the highest ranking elected Iranian-American officials in the United States. He once again took the post of mayor of Beverly Hills on March 16, 2010.

Prominent Persian Jewish congregations in the Los Angeles area include Nessah Synagogue and the Eretz-Siamak Cultural Center. Persian Jews also constitute a large part of the membership at Sinai Temple in Westwood, one of the largest Conservative congregations in the United States.

                                                            

Designer-builder Hamid Omrani in front of one of the Persian Palaces he designed in Beverly Hills.

The Iranian American Jewish Federation (IAJF) of Los Angeles is a prominent non-profit organization that has been serving the Iranian Jewish community of Greater Los Angeles for the last forty-one years. IAJF is a leading organization in their efforts to fight local and global Antisemitism, protect Iranian Jews domestically and abroad, promote a unified community, participating in social and public affairs, provide financial and psychosocial assistance to those in need through philanthropic activities, and more.

New York                                                      

GREAT NECK, New York — The Chattanooga Restaurant was one of the hippest places to be in Tehran before the 1979 Islamic revolution. Serving continental cuisine, the coffee house-cum-art gallery was a gathering spot for celebrities and royalty and its ice coffee was legendary.  Reflecting the steady influx of Jewish Persian immigrants since the fall of the shah, Great Neck, New York, is home to its own Chatanooga (sic) Restaurant, a glatt kosher establishment founded in 2001 that serves up Middle Eastern salads, stews, and kebabs.

Kings Point, a village constituting part of Great Neck, has the greatest percentage of Iranians in the United States (approximately 40%). Unlike the Iranian community in Los Angeles, which contains a large number of non-Jewish Iranians, the Iranian population in and around Great Neck is almost entirely Jewish.

Several thousand of the Great Neck area's 10,000 Persian Jews trace their origins to the Iranian city of Mashad, constituting the largest Mashadi community in the United States. After practicing Judaism in secret for almost 100 years, many of the Mashadi crypto-Jews returned to overt Judaism after the rise of the secular Pahlavi dynasty. The Mashadi community in Great Neck operates its own synagogues and community centers, and members typically marry within the community.

The Iranian American Jewish Federation (IAJF) of New York has been serving the Iranian Jewish community for the last sixteen years. The organization's goal is to be a unifier amongst Iranian Jews in the Greater New York metropolitan area and engagement in philanthropic activities.

                                               

"Genetic studies show that Persian and Babylonian Jews form a distinct cluster amongst the Jewish People and that the MtDNA of Persian Jews and Bukharan Jews descend from a small number of female ancestors."  We Ashkenazim were also told this, that we descended from a small number of female ancestors. A woman might bear a child every 2 years or so, that this can add up to 10 or more children per woman.  They in turn multiply and those numbers repeat.

                                                         

Ke Hao, PhD:   Dr. Hao is currently an associate professor of the Department of Genetics and Genomic Sciences and a member of Icahn Institute of Data Science and Genomic Technology. Dr. Hao received his ScD degree and postdoc training at Harvard University and has extensive expertise in statistical genetics, computational biology and environmental health.    

"Another study of L. Hao et al. ( The history of African gene flow into Southern Europeans, Levantines, and Jews) studied seven groups of Jewish populations with different geographic origin (Ashkenazi, Italian, Greek, Turkish, Iranian, Iraqi, and Syrian) and showed that the individuals all shared a common Middle Eastern background, although they were also genetically distinguishable from each other. In public comments,                                

 Harry Ostrer, the director of the Human Genetics Program at NYU Langone Medical Center, also a Professor of Pathology and Genetics at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University and Director of Genetic and Genomic Testing at Montefiore Medical Center.and one of the authors of this study, concluded, "We have shown that Jewishness can be identified through genetic analysis, so the notion of a Jewish people is plausible."  He's also the author of Legacy, A Genetic History of the Jewish People.  From the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, (2012)" Dr. Ostrer is a long-time investigator of the genetics of the Jewish people. For over 30 years, he has studied the genetic basis of single-gene disorders in Jewish populations and implemented new genetic tests and screening programs to benefit Jewish people.  In 2007, he organized the Jewish HapMap Project, an international effort to map and sequence the genomes of Jewish people. In a series of publications about Abraham’s Children in the Genome Era, Dr. Ostrer and his team of investigators demonstrated that the history of the Jewish Diasporas could be seen in the genomes of contemporary Jewish people—an observation that gained worldwide recognition. He is also an investigator of the genetics of Hispanic and Latino people, including Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Ecuadorians and Mexicans who currently reside in New York City.

                                                             

    Gil Atzmon, Ph.D.  also of Albert Einstein College of Medicine

An autosomal DNA study carried out in 2010 by Atzmon et al. examined the origin of Iranian, Iraqi, Syrian, Turkish, Greek, Sephardic, and Ashkenazi Jewish communities. The study compared these Jewish groups with 1043 unrelated individuals from 52 worldwide populations. To further examine the relationship between Jewish communities and European populations, 2407 European subjects were assigned and divided into 10 groups based on geographic region of their origin. This study confirmed previous findings of shared Middle Eastern origin of the above Jewish groups and found that "the genetic connections between the Jewish populations became evident from the frequent IBD across these Jewish groups (63% of all shared segments). 

Jewish populations shared more and longer segments with one another than with non-Jewish populations, highlighting the commonality of Jewish origin. Among pairs of populations ordered by total sharing, 12 out of the top 20 were pairs of Jewish populations, and "none of the top 30 paired a Jewish population with a non-Jewish one". Atzmon concludes that "Each Jewish group demonstrated Middle Eastern ancestry and variable admixture from host population, while the split between Middle Eastern and European/Syrian Jews, calculated by simulation and comparison of length distributions of IBD segments, occurred 100–150 generations ago, which was described as "compatible with a historical divide that is reported to have occurred more than 2500 years ago" as the Jewish community in Iraq and Iran were formed by Jews in the Babylonian and Persian empires during and after Babylonian exile. 

The main difference between Mizrahi and Ashkenazi/Sephardic Jews was the absence of Southern European components in the former. According to these results, European/Syrian Jewish populations, including the Ashkenazi Jewish community, were formed latter, as a result of the expulsion and migration of Jews from the Land of Israel, during Roman rule. 

Concerning Ashkenazi Jews, this study found that genetic dates "are incompatible with theories that Ashkenazi Jews are for the most part the direct lineal descendants of converted Khazars or Slavs". 

                                Doron M. Behar of Rambam Healthcare, Israel, Chief Medical Officer and Cofounder of Gene by Gene,

Citing Behar, Atzmon states that "Evidence for founder females of Middle Eastern origin has been observed in all Jewish populations based on non overlapping mitochondrial haplotypes with coalescence times >2000 years". 

The closest people related to Jewish groups were the Palestinians, Bedouins, Druze, Greeks, and Italians. Regarding this relationship, the authors conclude that "These observations are supported by the significant overlap of Y chromosomal haplogroups between Israeli and Palestinian Arabs with Ashkenazi and non-Ashkenazi Jewish populations"

                                                             

                        Priya Moorjani --Affiliation: University of California, Berkeley, Research interests: Population_and_evolutionary_genetics, at Department of Molecular and Cell Biology  Center for Computational Biology.  Another Moorjani, Anita Moorjani, had a near death experience; had  parents from India but was born in Singapore.  Her experience is written up in a book.  

In 2011, Moorjani et al. detected 3%–5% sub-Saharan African ancestry in all eight of the diverse Jewish populations (Ashkenazi Jews, Syrian Jews, Iranian Jews, Iraqi Jews, Greek Jews, Turkish Jews, Italian Jews) that they analyzed. The timing of this African admixture among all Jewish populations was identical The exact date was not determined, but it was estimated to have taken place between 1,600 (4th Century AD) and 3,400 (14th Century BCE) years ago. Although African admixture was determined among South Europeans and Near Eastern population too, this admixture was found to be younger compared to the Jewish populations. This findings the authors explained as evidence regarding common origin of these 8 main Jewish groups. 

"It is intriguing that the Mizrahi Irani and Iraqi Jews—who are thought to descend at least in part from Jews who were exiled to Babylon about 2,600 years ago share the signal of African admixture. A parsimonious explanation for these observations is that they reflect a history in which many of the Jewish groups descend from a common ancestral population which was itself admixed with Africans (most likely Ancient Egyptians), prior to the beginning of the Jewish diaspora that occurred in 8th to 6th century BC" the authors concludes."

Resource:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_Jews_in_Israel

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persian_Jews

See also: History of the Iranians in Los Angeles and History of the Jews in Los Angeles

https://jewishweek.timesofisrael.com/young-iranian-jews-now-pushing-beyond-old-boundaries/