On May 15, someone broke into and set aflame a shrine in the Iranian city of Hamadan that—according to local Jewish tradition—encloses the tomb of the biblical Esther and Mordecai. The Iranian government bears responsibility for this act of arson, write Alireza Nader and Benjamin Weinthal:
If some elements in the regime, or its Western apologists, eventually get around to shedding crocodile tears: don’t buy it. The shrine has been neglected and vulnerable to attack since the 1979 revolution that brought the Islamic Republic to power. . . . In 2011, anti-Jewish mobs rioted at the shrine, which had been restored by a Persian-Jewish architect under the shah, because the structure contains a Star of David. . . . As recently as February, the regime’s Basij paramilitary forces threatened to storm the site.
The threat to the shrine is of a piece with a wider pattern of attacks on minority religious sites in Iran over the last few days. Arsonists, most likely groups associated with the regime, also targeted a Hindu temple in Bandar Abbas and a Christian cemetery in Eslamshahr.
Such vandalism and hatred are in the regime’s DNA. The Islamist revolutionaries who took over Iran in 1979 began their reign of terror by targeting the Jewish community. Habib Elghanian, a successful businessman, was one of the first Iranians to be executed in May 1979. The triumphant revolutionaries picked him simply because he was the symbolic head of the Iranian Jewish community. Thus began a terror that would eventually encompass not only Jews, but also Baha’is, Christians, Sunnis, Sufis, Zoroastrians, secular Iranians, and anyone deemed an enemy of the republic.
The regime seems to be renewing its assault on religious minorities to send a warning to the population at large at a restive moment. . . . Iranian Jews are especially vulnerable. There are fewer than 10,000 Jews left in Iran, and the regime can use them as hostages in response to Western pressure.
Read more on New York Post: https://nypost.com/2020/05/21/irans-new-push-to-erase-its-millennia-of-jewish-history/