On March 15, 1979, Habib Elghanian, an Iranian-Jewish philanthropist and entrepreneur, was arrested by the Islamist government that had just installed itself in Tehran. He had previously turned down many opportunities to leave: even after the government had forbidden him from exiting the country, the Israeli ambassador offered him a seat on one of the last El Al flights out, no ticket or passport necessary. He offered the seat to a family member. Two months after his arrest, the government announced that he had been shot, on charges including “friendship with the enemies of God” and “spying for the Zionistic state of Israel.”
Tara Bahrampour reviews a new biography of Elghanian, written by his granddaughter Shahrzad:
Elghanayan travels the world to talk with her grandfather’s friends, relatives, and business associates, and pores over books, news articles, letters, photos, videos, and journals. She learns that his birth and death were bookends to an extraordinary sweet spot of openness and opportunity for Jews in Iran. Jews had lived there since before the arrival of Islam and had survived centuries of discrimination. When Elghanian was born in 1912, about 50,000 lived in ghettos in Iranian cities. Just six years earlier, equal rights for minority groups were enshrined in a new Western-style constitution, paving the way for Jews to integrate into the broader social, economic, and political landscape.
The son of a poor tailor, Elghanian grew up in a neighborhood of narrow alleys beside an open garbage dump. But his family valued education, and he and his brothers attended a school that provided a modern trilingual education, and were taken under the wings of uncles building up small import-export businesses between Iran and Europe.
Before the revolution there would have been little reason for Elghanian to leave Iran: he was a highly respected community leader who had established charitable foundations, served on the Chamber of Commerce and as the head of the Central Jewish Board of Tehran, built some of the capital’s first high-rises, and helped forge connections between Iran and Israel.
Read more on Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/04/08/amid-revolution-her-jewish-grandfather-refused-leave-iran-why/