How Some 1,800 Jewish Children Escaped Iran to Brooklyn during the Revolution

Feb. 21 2019

In 1978, as the revolution that overthrew the shah of Iran was beginning, Chabad-Lubavitch Ḥasidim launched Operation Exodus, in which they brought hundreds of Persian Jewish children to their enclave in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Crown Heights. Dovid Margolin explains how this came about:

This unlikely story of rescue began the late 1970s, when an Italian-born Chabad yeshiva student named Hertzel Illulian was studying in New York. His parents were successful Persian Jewish immigrants . . . and he had grown up in comfort in Milan. [As a teenager], Illulian became more religious and eventually came to New York to study at the Lubavitch yeshiva there. . . . Illulian dreamed of traveling to his ancestral homeland, Iran, to try to [missionize to the Jewish community there]. Iran was safe; he spoke Farsi—it was a good match. In . . . the summer of 1978, Illulian [met with] Sholem-Ber Hecht, then the rabbi of the Sephardic Jewish Congregation in Queens [and] broached the idea of their going to Iran together. Hecht was intrigued. . . .

The details were then worked out, and both Illulian and Hecht raised the funds needed to cover the trip. “Our original intention was to establish a liaison with the community there, and then to see if it made sense to send an official emissary there,” says Hecht. They landed in Tehran on a calm day in August of 1978. Revolutions and refugees were the last thing on their minds. . . .

While Hecht and Illulian had come to what was still a stable Iran, street demonstrations against the shah had already begun. . . . Hecht recalls sitting in the home of the Tehran rabbi Netanel Ben-Haim after Shabbat had ended and seeing the television screen flash images of street demonstrations turned violent. The sudden violence frightened the Jewish community. Whereas the Chabad rabbis had hoped perhaps to meet a handful of Jewish boys who would be interested in coming to America to study in yeshiva, by the second week of their trip Iranian parents began approaching them about the possibility of sending their children with them. . . . In October, during the intermediary days of the holiday of Sukkot, Illulian returned to Tehran alone, this time armed with I-20 visa applications.

Illulian and the network of Chabad rabbis with whom he was working were soon inundated with requests from worried Jewish parents, as revolutionary violence intensified and the revolutionaries adopted increasingly anti-Semitic rhetoric. The result was that by 1981, some 1,800 young Persian Jews had been settled in the U.S under Chabad auspices. Although when they left their homes they expected to return as soon as the upheaval subsided, it soon became clear that their relocations would be permanent.

Read more at Chabad.org

More about: Brooklyn, Chabad, History & Ideas, Immigration, Iranian Revolution, Persian Jewry

Egypt Is Trapped by the Gaza Dilemma It Helped to Create

Feb. 14 2025

Recent satellite imagery has shown a buildup of Egyptian tanks near the Israeli border, in violation of Egypt-Israel agreements going back to the 1970s. It’s possible Cairo wants to prevent Palestinians from entering the Sinai from Gaza, or perhaps it wants to send a message to the U.S. that it will take all measures necessary to keep that from happening. But there is also a chance, however small, that it could be preparing for something more dangerous. David Wurmser examines President Abdel Fatah el-Sisi’s predicament:

Egypt’s abysmal behavior in allowing its common border with Gaza to be used for the dangerous smuggling of weapons, money, and materiel to Hamas built the problem that exploded on October 7. Hamas could arm only to the level that Egypt enabled it. Once exposed, rather than help Israel fix the problem it enabled, Egypt manufactured tensions with Israel to divert attention from its own culpability.

Now that the Trump administration is threatening to remove the population of Gaza, President Sisi is reaping the consequences of a problem he and his predecessors helped to sow. That, writes Wurmser, leaves him with a dilemma:

On one hand, Egypt fears for its regime’s survival if it accepts Trump’s plan. It would position Cairo as a participant in a second disaster, or nakba. It knows from its own history; King Farouk was overthrown in 1952 in part for his failure to prevent the first nakba in 1948. Any leader who fails to stop a second nakba, let alone participates in it, risks losing legitimacy and being seen as weak. The perception of buckling on the Palestine issue also resulted in the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s assassination in 1981. President Sisi risks being seen by his own population as too weak to stand up to Israel or the United States, as not upholding his manliness.

In a worst-case scenario, Wurmser argues, Sisi might decide that he’d rather fight a disastrous war with Israel and blow up his relationship with Washington than display that kind of weakness.

Read more at The Editors

More about: Egypt, Gaza War 2023