Iranian Jews in Israel skeptical of Rouhani
Salome Worch was born in Iran, grew up and spent most of her adult life there. The daughter of a Jewish mother and a Muslim father, she was registered as a Muslim in Iran’s records. Gradually, she grew more interested in her Jewish heritage, and in 2005 eventually immigrated to Israel, where she works in catering.
“Don’t use my maiden name because my brother is still in Iran and I wouldn’t want to put him in any danger,” she warned The Media Line.
Worch says she is deeply skeptical that the election of new Iranian President Hassan Rouhani heralds any change in Iran’s policies.
“I wouldn’t trust him -- he’s just another Mullah,” she said, referring to the Iranian clerics who are in charge of Iran’s policies. “I wouldn’t trust him at all.”
She said that the men running Iran are the same faces as when she was a student in the 1980s.
“These faces I see now were young Islamic students in the 1980s,” she said. “I don’t seem them as the opposition, and I don’t see them as a breath of anything.”
She agreed with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s description of Rouhani as a “wolf in sheep’s clothing,” and says she rarely reads the Iranian papers.
http://www.jpost.com/Middle-East/Iranian-Jews-in-Israel-skeptical-of-Rouhani-327690
Iran’s Jewish community reflects a complicated relationship with Israel
TEHRAN — In his address this week to the United Nations General Assembly , Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Iran threatens his country’s existence, accused the Islamic Republic of institutionalized anti-Semitism and called its new president, Hassan Rouhani, a “wolf in sheep’s clothing.”
But one group that rejects such claims is Iran’s large community of Jews, a lasting reminder to the long relationship between Persian and Jewish culture that complicates the tense relationship between the two countries over Iran’s nuclear program.
Today there are fewer than 30,000 Jews living in Iran, down from more than 100,000 in the 1970s, but besides a mass exodus following Iran’s 1979 revolution and the founding of the Islamic Republic, their numbers have remained consistent, and they constitute the largest population of Jews in the Middle East outside Israel.
A recent State Department report on religious freedoms around the world said of Iran that anti-Semitic rhetoric by some government officials has resulted in a “hostile environment for the Jewish community,” but barring “some exceptions, there was little government restriction of, or interference with, Jewish religious practice. However, the Jewish community experienced official discrimination.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/irans-jewish-community-reflects-a-complicated-relationship-with-israel/2013/10/02/e531039e-2ac4-11e3-b141-298f46539716_story.html