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Copyright © 1999, by the Middle East Data Project, Inc. All rights reserved.
Efforts to gain the freedom of the 13 Shirazi Jews, arrested in April and accused in June of spying for Israel, has aroused an old dilemma within the Iranian Jewish Diaspora of whether to use quiet diplomacy and bribes to get them out, or to make their plight a cause celebre, embarrassing the regime into letting them go.
On the quiet side have been the efforts of Sam Kermanian, who heads the Iranian American Jewish Federation in Los Angeles, an establishment group of older and relatively wealthy Iranian exiles. As soon as he received word of the arrests in April, Mr. Kermanian sought to win their release through intermediaries in close contact with the Ministry of Information and Security (MOIS), Iran's intelligence service, with whom his group had established a channel of communication in recent years.
Once the French Press Agency broke the news of the Jews' arrest, in a May 30 report, advocates of turning the 13 Jews into a public cause gained ground. They are being led by Pooya Dayanim, a lawyer in Santa Monica, the co-founder of the Committee for Religious Minority Rights in Iran and spokesman for the Council of Iranian Jewish Organizations. The Council, which has a much wider following than the Federation, primarily appeals to the younger generation of Iranians.
The debate turned acrimonious in July, when it became know that the Federation quietists had successfully hushed up earlier incidents involving eleven Iranian Jews who went missing while attempting to flee Iran illegally between 1994 and 1997. None of the eleven has been seen since. New York Jewish Week (8/27) reported that the earlier, hitherto unknown incidents were exposed at a July 8 meeting in Los Angeles, where parents of two of the missing Jews accused Iranian-American Jewish leaders of doing nothing to discover their fate.
Most of the eleven are from Tehran, and disappeared during four separate attempts to flee Iran. Each attempt, said Jewish Week, involved others who succeeded in leaving the country.
Frank Nikbakht, an activist for the Council, told Jewish Week that the Iranian American Jewish Federation for years had a policy of "keeping people silent so that there would not be anything against the regime from this community." Mr. Nikbakht and other activists claimed that five Jews have been executed in Iran over the last five years despite the cooperation of Kermanian's Federation with the regime. He urged the community to take a more critical and confrontational approach.
In another, previously unpublicized attack on Iranian Jews, the Iranian authorities were said to have bulldozed headstones at a Jewish cemetery in the city of Mashad, according to Moshe Zvuluni, a Mashadi Jew now living in Israel. Speaking on Israel radio last month, Zvuluni said an Iranian Jew who went to visit his grandfather's grave at the cemetery told him that all headstones had been bulldozed in the middle of the night two weeks ago, bust that the bones were not removed. "They didn't leave a single grave," Zvuluni said (AP 8/16).
London lawyer: Details of alleged negotiations between Kermanian's faction and the Iranian regime were exposed by Ronen Bergman in the English-language edition of Ha'aretz on Aug. 19. He claimed that the regime's efforts to exploit the Iranian-American Jewish community began at least four years ago, when Intelligence Minister Ali Fallahian decided the regime needed to open a channel. Fallahian put a middle-ranking MOIS official named Hussain Saderzadeh in charge of the contacts, according to Bergman. Mr. Saderzadeh ultimately made contact in London with a Jewish lawyer of Iranian origin, Hamid Sabi, who became his principle interlocutor with Mr. Kermanian's group in Los Angeles.
Contacted by the Iran Brief, Mr. Sabi angrily challenged Bergman's motives, and refused to comment on the details of his story. He acknowledged, however, that he continued to serve as the overseas lawyer for Noushab Manufacturing Company in Iran, a competitor of the Bonyad-e Mostazafan which has been suing Coca Cola for breach of contract for cutting off supplies to Coke's proprietary syrup. "Yes, I am their lawyer," he said. The Noushab tie gave him access to high-ranking Iranian government officials. He said he has not been back to Iran since the Revolution.....
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