This is heavy for me to speak about, not as a rabbi but as the daughter of Iranian refugees.

Over the past few weeks, what is happening in Iran has not felt distant to me. I carry it with me, in my body, in my conversations, in the way I move through each day. I wake up to the news. I hear from family. I think about the people I know who are still there, and the ones who left and never went back.

Courtesy

The author's maternal relatives, the Kohanim family, in Shiraz, Iran, in 1954.

At the recent Zionism conference hosted by the Leffell Foundation, I addressed over 150 rabbis and left that room thinking about one thing. Not that people don’t care. They do. But there is a real gap in understanding what is actually happening in Iran right now and why it matters, not just for Israel, but for the Jewish people and, honestly, for the world.

And in a room of rabbis, people our communities look to for clarity, that gap is significant.

This is not a distant geopolitical issue. Iran is not operating in isolation. It sits at the center of a network that funds and directs groups across the region and beyond, including Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, and others. It is all connected.

For rabbis and educators, this is not something we can ignore. We are not only teachers of text. We are interpreters of the world people are living in right now. Our communities look to us to help make sense of what is happening and to respond with clarity and responsibility.

We have a stake in this, not in theory but in reality. What we choose to teach, what we choose to name and what we choose to leave unspoken shapes how people understand the world.

As I said in my remarks at the conference, you never know where help can come from. But that only happens when people understand what is at stake.

My parents came to the United States in the 1970s as students. There were only a handful of universities in Iran at the time, so like many others, they went abroad, often to the United States, with every intention of returning home.

But in 1979, the Revolution happened, and my parents, who were studying in America, never went back.

Slowly, the rest of my family followed. Some were able to escape and secure visas through countries like Spain or Italy before eventually making their way to the United States. Others fled under far more dangerous circumstances, like my great aunt, who was smuggled out in the middle of the night on horseback through Pakistan, praying for her life the entire way.

Today, Los Angeles is home to the largest Iranian population outside of Iran, including Jews, Muslims, and Bahai. It is affectionately known as Irangeles, or Tehrangeles. It is where I was born and where I grew up.

I grew up on stories of Iran, how beautiful it is, how rich its culture is. Every time I bit into a watermelon, my mom would say, almost wistfully, “Wait until you try the watermelon in Iran. That’s real sweetness.” Even Farsi was my first language.

It is because they believed they would go back one day, once things settled after the Revolution. They never imagined they would never return home.

Can you imagine leaving home at 17 or 18 for college, expecting to come back in a few years, and then never being able to return?

So a few weeks ago, on Shabbat Zachor, when Israel attacked Iran, you can imagine what that stirred in my family. My phone was off for Shabbat, but my neighbor knocked on my door to tell me what had happened. I turned on the TV and my phone, and messages started coming in.

“This is it,” one friend wrote.

“I’m packing my bags for Shiraz,” my aunt wrote in our family group chat. Shiraz is where our family is from.

My uncle responded, “Slow down. We don’t even know what’s happening yet. We’ll probably need boots on the ground first.”

And then, almost impatiently, she responded again: “I’m packing my bags.”

Every day, I wake up to news about Iran. And in many ways, it has always been this way. The cycle repeats itself: I wake up, I check the news, I brace for what I might see. It may have faded into the background for others, but it never has for me.

This is not just about the Strait of Hormuz or oil prices. It is about people. It is about my heritage, my heart, a part of my soul that has always felt just out of reach.

As colleagues began to check in and ask how I was, I started to realize that they didn’t quite understand what this felt like. It wasn’t just sadness, and it wasn’t something easy to name. I began to see that not everyone understands how Iranian Jews in the diaspora are experiencing this moment, when all of our countries are entangled in conflict: Israel, the United States, and Iran.

So I’ll tell you honestly: we are hopeful.

My family lived a good life in Iran under the shah. But in 1979, when Ayatollah Khomeini came to power, the country was transformed into a radical Islamic regime. It was not like that before.

Since then, the regime has maintained control through force. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps uses violence, including beatings, rape, and drugs, as tools of repression to keep their power in place.

The first time I felt a real sense of hope, that change might actually come in Iran, that this regime could be challenged, was when people took to the streets during the Women, Life, Freedom movement a few years ago.

It began when a young Kurdish woman, Mahsa Amini, traveled to Tehran for the weekend with her brother and was arrested by the morality police, the force that patrols the streets to enforce dress codes for women. She was detained because a piece of her hair was showing, and reportedly part of her ankle. She was taken into a police van and into custody, and footage later showed her collapsing. She was rushed to the hospital, where she fell into a coma and died. It was widely reported that she was so severely beaten while in custody, inside the van, that this led to her coma and death.

That is when people took to the streets.

As my mom always likes to remind me, the system that took hold in Iran in 1979, forcing so many to flee, reflects an ideology that many Iranians experience as imposed, not something rooted in the country’s own history or identity.

Even the leadership behind the revolution reflects influences beyond Iran’s borders. Ayatollah Khomeini’s family traces back to India, and Ayatollah Khamenei’s roots connect to Najaf in Iraq. The worldview that shaped this regime is not homegrown. It is foreign, disconnected from Iran’s lived culture and history.

Iran’s history did not begin with this regime. Long before 1979, long before Islam, Iran was home to an ancient and deeply rooted civilization shaped by traditions like Zoroastrianism and leaders like Cyrus the Great. The Jews of Iran are among the oldest continuous Jewish communities in the world, present for over 2,700 years. We are proud of that history. We are not Arab. We are Persian. We are the children of Esther.

When we say occupation, this is what we mean: a regime imposed on its people, enforcing a brutal and repressive way of life that does not reflect who they are.

There is one more distinction that often gets lost. When people say the U.S. and Israel are “attacking Iran,” they are not talking about the Iranian people. They are talking about the regime, one that has occupied a population that is desperate to be free of it.

Before 1979, there were an estimated 80,000 to 100,000 Jews in Iran. Today, estimates vary, but most place the number closer to 8,000 to 10,000.

So when you see Persians walking fearlessly in the streets, understand that this kind of courage doesn’t come from nowhere. It comes from a history of knowing what freedom once looked like, and from a deep cultural memory of a different Iran, one where people of different faiths lived side by side in dignity and peace, going back to the time of Cyrus the Great.

When asked by reporters, “Aren’t you afraid of dying?” many respond, “We have been living without freedom for 47 years. What do we have to lose?”

This is the message I want to leave you with. We just finished the first two nights of the Passover Seder, and at its core, the Seder is about one thing: asking questions.

The Haggadah is the first curriculum we were given. Everything has a seder, an order, and yet it is intentionally disrupted. We wash our hands, but there is no blessing (normally, washing hands is followed by eating bread), and then we say a blessing over a vegetable from the ground. It does not follow what we expect. It is meant to make us pause and ask, Why? What comes first? What comes next? Why does this feel out of order?

The Seder is designed to provoke curiosity. It invites conversation, even disagreement. More than anything, it teaches us to ask.

Because questions are what keep us from following Pharaohs blindly. Slavery is not only physical. It begins when we stop questioning, when we follow without thinking, when we accept things as they are without examining them.

And the tradition does not leave anyone out of that responsibility. Whether you are the wise one, the resistant one, the simple one, or the one who does not yet know how to ask, the tradition makes space for you and insists that you engage.

Because freedom depends on it.

So ask. Ask the hard questions. Ask the uncomfortable ones. Ask the ones you think you are not supposed to ask. And for those of us who lead, who teach, who people turn to for understanding, we have a responsibility to do the same, to go deeper, to understand the full picture and to help others make sense of a world that so often feels out of order.

Because the moment we stop asking is the moment we begin to lose our freedom.

And if you are still trying to understand, still wrestling, still unsure what to make of all of this, that is exactly where you are supposed to be. Ask.

Rabbi Tarlan Rabizadeh is the vice president of Jewish engagement at American Jewish University and director of the Maas Center for Jewish Journeys. A Persian American rabbi, her work focuses on Jewish identity, education and building bridges between Ashkenazi and Sephardi/Mizrachi communities.