WASHINGTON —
The U.S. State Department has denounced as "abhorrent" Iran’s apparent coercion of its Jewish minority into staging an unprecedented series of anti-Israel rallies in five Iranian cities Oct. 30.
In a Friday email to VOA, a State Department spokesperson said the Biden administration is aware of reports Iranian authorities "coerced Iranian Jewish leaders and their communities" to engage in the protests.
Videos and photos published by five Iranian state news agencies and reviewed by VOA showed hundreds of Iranian Jews participating in the , home to the largest Jewish community in Iran, as well as the cities of , , and . The rallies involved gatherings and speeches inside and outside synagogues and street processions in which participants held signs and chanted slogans condemning Israel.
The State Department’s latest annual report on international religious freedom, published in May, cited the Tehran Jewish Committee as saying Iran is home to approximately 9,000 Jews. It also cited an unnamed member of the community as giving a higher population estimate of 20,000 during a 2021 visit to the United States.
In the email to VOA, the State Department spokesperson noted that Iran’s Jews, like other religious minorities, have endured discrimination and persecution since 1979, when Shiite clerics opposed to Israel’s existence seized power. The email also noted that Iran is among the worst violators of religious freedom worldwide and its officials regularly spread antisemitic views.
"It is reprehensible that the Iranian regime continues to pressure religious groups to advance their propaganda," the spokesperson said. In reference to the Israel-Hamas war, the spokesperson added, "Iran’s apparent exploitation of this conflict to advance its repression and propaganda against its Jewish community is abhorrent."
Iranian state news agencies , , , and all sent their own reporters to the Oct. 30 anti-Israel rallies, filming, photographing and interviewing participants.
At the rally inside Tehran’s main Yusef Abad synagogue, prominent rabbi Yehuda Gerami told a gathering of more than 100 congregants that they should avoid contact with Israelis, whom he said "consider themselves to be Jews and commit crimes in Palestine."
Younes Hamami Lalehzar, another prominent Iranian rabbi, also spoke at the synagogue, condemning what he called the crimes of the "Zionist regime," a pejorative term for Israel, for "killing the innocent people of Gaza."
Israel has said it only targets what it calls terrorist sites in Gaza while acknowledging that its strikes have killed Palestinian civilians whom it says Hamas uses as human shields.
Iranian Jewish diaspora researchers and journalists told VOA that the Oct. 30 rallies marked the first time they have seen Iran’s Jews engage in anti-Israel protests on such a large scale.
Karmel Melamed, a Los Angeles-based Jewish Iranian American journalist and researcher, said he had never seen what he called "this scale of the Iranian regime parading the Jews and using them to make statements under duress for propaganda purposes." Melamed said he based his assessment in part on contacts in recent days with Iran-based Jews, whom he did not identify to protect their safety.
Beni Sabti, a Persian Israeli researcher at Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies, said Iranian Jews faced threats to their businesses from the Iranian government and its supporters during previous fighting between Israel and Hamas in the last two decades.
"But this time, the conflict is bigger, so the pressure on Iran’s Jews is greater and they took this very unusual step of protesting against Israel in synagogues, a symbol of their Judaism," Sabti said. "It is an act of survival."
Images of the Oct. 30 rallies published by the Iranian state news agencies showed Iranian Jews holding anti-Israel banners and signs in both Persian and English as they walked in street processions in Tehran and Isfahan and stood at an intersection in Kermanshah. Similar signs in Persian and English also were displayed at synagogues in Shiraz and Yazd.
Melamed said Iranian state media devoted extensive coverage to the Jewish rallies in part to convince Iranians, many of whom have protested in recent years for an end to Islamist rule, that even Iran’s tiny Jewish minority adopts the government’s position on the Israel-Hamas war.
But he said the images of Iranian Jews with signs in Persian and English also appear to have another intended audience – the West.